Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/757

-1775] Conservatism of American character. 725 life. He thinks it the perfection of human nature to make pin-heads. He leaves other matters to inferior abilities. It is enough for him that he believes in the Athanasian Creed, reverences the splendour of the Court, and makes pin-heads." The style is certainly that of the full eighteenth century ; but the matter, on inspection, seems not quite so. It lacks the individualisation which from the time of the Toiler dis- tinguished the English Essay from the Character-writing of earlier days. One needs little reflection to remember that this more vague and general kind of literary temper was at its height in England not during the eighteenth century but during the seventeenth. Its masters Hall and Overbury and Earle and Fuller flourished before the Commonwealth. Taken by itself, such an indication would be trivial. Taken in conjunction with innumerable other symptoms, of which it may fairly serve for an example, it suggests that one chief difference between Englishmen in 1775 and the rebellious colonists may have been that the latter, far more than the former, preserved traits which had ceased to be fully characteristic of England a hundred years before. In other words, there is fair ground for belief that between 1650 and 1775 there was far more change in the temper of England than in that of America. The same we found true during the century of American independence which has ensued. And in 1650 the settlements, both of Virginia and of New England, were within living memory. The obvious conclusion is that the national character of the United States preserves, far more than that of England, the traits which the founders of the colonies shared with their fellow-countrymen in the first half of the seventeenth century. In other words, the origin of the characteristics of modern America is to be sought in Elizabethan England : for the first settlers of Jamestown, of Plymouth, and of Massachusetts alike, so far as they were of mature years, were Englishmen born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This does not mean, of course, that modern America is an isolated survival of that elder England which vanished in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. It does mean, however, that to understand modern America, it is desirable to remember that its ways parted from those of England in the days when men born under the Virgin Queen were in their prime. And the surprising power of assimilation which that vigorous race has shown from the beginning has combined with compara- tive stability of internal circumstances to preserve in America more traces of Elizabethan England than have survived in the mother-country. Virginia is a name which still suggests an element of lasting truth. New England would be better named if, in the course of generations, it had come to be called Old. And the deep mutual misunderstanding which resulted in the American Revolution arose more from changes in the national temper of England than from changes in America itself. In some important respects the New World has not speeded ahead of the Old ; it has rather lingered behind it. en. xxin.