You are great, but not towards us Americans.  Towards us you are little and insignificant and superfluous.  Your eyes, though of wondrous efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the smallest birds—­of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one—­to pester you back into your medieval twilight.

Shall I try to tell you why you can have no right to judge us and our affairs?  By your leave, then, and briefly.

There is a spiritual nature of man, which is ever and everywhere the same; and, through the necessary presence of this in every human being, there is a common sense and a common conscience, which make each man one with all others.  Here in America we are seeking to give the force of political sovereignty to this common and unitive nature,—­assuming that all political problems are at last questions of simple justice, courage, good sense, and fellow-feeling, which any sound heart and healthy intelligence may appreciate.

On the other hand, there is the truth of spiritual Rank or Degree,—­that one man may be immensely superior in human quality to another.  This is the truth that is most powerfully present to your mind, and you would constitute government strictly, if not solely, in the light of it.  To this you are impelled by the peculiar quality of your genius, which is so purely biographical, so inevitably drawn to special personalities, that you can hardly conceive of history otherwise than as a record of personal influence.

We assume, then, as a basis, common sense; you, uncommon sense.  We assume Unity or Identity; you assume Difference, and seek to reconstitute unity only through mastership on the one hand and reverent obedience on the other.  We do not deny Difference; we recognize the truth of spiritual Degree; we merely elect the common element as the material out of which to constitute, and the force by which to operate, the State.

Now my judgment is, that either the truth of a common Manhood or the truth of spiritual Rank may be made primary in a State, and that with admirable results, provided it be duly allied and tempered with its opposite.  For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each required by the other.  But chasm is worse than indistinction; and he that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he who blurs the hues of gradation.

I affirm, then, that America has a grand spiritual fact at the base of her political system.  But you are the prophet of an opposite order of truths.  And you are so intensely the partisan of your pole, that you have not a moment’s patience with anything else, above all with an opposite partiality.  And wanting sympathy and patience with it, you equally want apprehension of its meaning.