Even Cotton Mather could not avoid a tone of pious boastfulness when he narrated the doings of New England.  Everything was remarkable.  New England had the most remarkable providences, the most remarkable painful preachers, the most remarkable heresies, the most remarkable witches.  Even the local devils were in his judgment more enterprising than those of the old country.  They had to be in order to be a match for the New England saints.

The staid Judge Sewall, after a study of the prophecies, was of the opinion that America was the only country in which they could be adequately fulfilled.  Here was a field large enough for those future battles between good and evil which enthralled the Puritan imagination.  To be sure, it would be said, there isn’t much just now to attract the historian whose mind dwells exclusively on the past.  But to one who dips into the future it is thrilling.  Here is the battlefield of Armageddon.  Some day we shall see “the spirits of devils working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth, and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.”  Just when that might take place might be uncertain but where it would take place was to them more obvious.

In the days of small things the settlers in the wilderness had large thoughts.  They felt themselves to be historical characters, as indeed they were.  They were impressed by the magnitude of the country and by the importance of their relation to it.  Their language took on a cosmic breadth.

Ethan Allen could not have assumed a more masterful tone if he had had an Empire at his back instead of undisciplined bands of Green Mountain Boys.  Writing to the Continental Congress, he declares that unless the demands of Vermont are complied with “we will retire into the fastnesses of our Green Mountains and will wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil, and Human Nature in general.”  And Ethan Allen meant it.

The love of the superlative is deeply seated in the American mind.  It is based on no very careful survey of the existing world.  It is a conclusion to which it is easy to jump.  I remember one week, traveling through the Mississippi Valley, stopping every night in some town that had something which was advertised as the biggest in the world.  On Friday I reached a sleepy little village which seemed the picture of contented mediocrity.  Here, thought I, I shall find no bigness to molest me or make me afraid.  But when I sat down to write a letter on the hotel stationery I was confronted with the statement, “This is the biggest little hotel in the State.”

When one starts a tune it is safer to start it rather low, so as not to come to grief on the upper notes.  In discussing the American temperament it is better to start modestly.  Instead of asking what excellent qualities we find in ourselves, we should ask what do other nations most dislike in us.  We can then have room to rise to better things.  There is a family resemblance between the worst and the best of any national group.  Kipling, in his lines “To an American,” may set the tune for us.  It is not too high.  His American is boastful, careless, and irrationally optimistic.