For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation.  We have originated little, because there is little to originate, but we have unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited systems of former ages and other countries—­receiving them at second hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national belief in their novelty.  Novelty!  Why, it is not possible to make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again.

The glories of England are our glories.  She can achieve nothing that our fathers did not help to make possible to her.  The learning, the power, the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century, but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the preceding.  For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that “reverend pile,” the civilization of England.  And shall we now try to belittle the mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land?  The American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in England’s glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser glory of his own country.

The English, are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the virtues are solely the product of intelligence and cultivation—­a rogue being only a dunce considered from another point of view—­they are our moral superiors likewise.  Why should they not be?  Theirs is a land, not of ugly schoolhouses grudgingly erected, containing schools supported by such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the state and by centuries of private benefaction.  As a means of dispensing formulated ignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; it spreads out education sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him a more competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compare it with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with malice aforethought, but the unnoted out-growth of ages, is to be ridiculous.  It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, its right-angled streets, prim cottages, and wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges, the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human record, as have the chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not only that we have had to “subdue the wilderness”; our educational conditions are adverse otherwise.  Our political system is unfavorable.  Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed in the next.  If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker.  Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted.  The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner.  If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?