Seven Months in America

AMERICA is not a nation : it is a state of mind."That is the only comprehensive text on which a book on the United States of to-day can be written.Until he reaches that conclusion the traveller stumbles in the dark.When, despite all assertions to the contrary, he determines to cleave fast to it, everything becomes clear.All that remains is joyfully to submit to the infection uf the Am.erican consciousness and to attempt to transmit it to Europe.For a man needs to travel in America before he can know what Europe means.Europe is an old old continent divided for centuries past into a number of fixed nations and cultures, each built up upon a foundation of immemorial origins.Europe sends the mind back to Greece and Rome and Palestine and the mediaeval Empire and Papacy, and often, further back still, to the institutions of Celt and Teuton and Slav in the days before history.She bears upon her old but unwearied body the marks of endless generations; every stone in her house shows 'the golden stain of time'; and the cup that she offers to each of us has been mixed by the gentle chemistry of the ages.The Law, the Church, the Monarchy, the Houses of Parliament, the Universities, even the place-names and the look of the landscape-all these are not of yesterday: all these were old before the Mayflower left Plymouth or the Spanish missionaries came up out of Mexico; all these, and much more that is bound up with them, are in the very air we breathe; they move or restrain us daily and hourly, far oftener and more surely than we can know-until they are suddenly and irrevocably withdrawn from us.The effects of that withdrawal are the subject of every immigrant's conversation and form the central theme of every true American's unconscious philosophy.Strange and curious indeed are their attempts to put so vague a feeling into words.The more definite and dogmatic the statement the more demonstrably false it can be shewn to be.Thomas Jefferson set the ball rolling in the Declaration of Independence.To him the emancipation from Europe appeared in the guise of Political Liberty.So it has become traditional among Americans (for America has traditions

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