ABSTRACT
The educated classes of England are, perhaps, more conventional in dress and manner than the corresponding classes in the United States. France has more solidarity than Great Britain or the United States, the ground being that people have a less fluent unity of the social mind, a more vigorous self-assertion of the individual. Energy and suggestion are equally indispensable to all human achievement. In the absence of the latter the mind easily spends itself in minor activities, and there is no reason why this should not be true of a whole people and continue for centuries. The American spirit is so little specialized and so much at one with the general spirit of human nature, does more than anything else to make it influential, and potent in the assimilation of strange elements. In America unity of spirit is intense, and yet singularly headless and formless.
