will be that our civilization, which to this point has sprawled over broad acres, will become an urban civilization, penned in amid conditions, restraints, privations, and perhaps also opportunities unprecedented in our past history and unknown to the experience we have had hitherto.  A final effect will be that our most conservative class, the rural populace, will no longer present resistance that is formidable to the innovations which those who hold extreme views are forever exhorting us to embrace; and the result may well be that the disintegration of this staying and stabilizing element in our citizenship—­one that retards and mollifies if it does not inhibit change—­will produce consequences in its train which may be as dire as they are difficult to foretell.

Appendix 2

    CAUSES FOR THE AMERICAN SPIRIT OF LIBERTY
    (From the Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies)
    By EDMUND BURKE

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.  This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.

First, the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen.  England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.  The Colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.  They are therefore not only devoted to liherty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.  Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.  Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.  It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing.  Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state.  The question of money was not with them so immediate.  But in England it was otherwise.  On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.  In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the