Carlyle, Renan, and many others have accordingly registered very crude judgments in disparagement of Americans because we have comparatively little literary merit. 1 It would seem that the most superficial reference to the conditions of human life would have prevented these childish reproaches. The physical conditions of American life thus far have necessarily distrained our powers and devoted them to pioneer work. We have had to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Individual poverty is no bar to intellectual greatness, but societies are not likely to pro- duce individuals intellectually great, or at least to give them the conditions in which their merit can manifest itself, until the societies are well advanced toward emancipation from the most absorbing struggle with physical conditions. In so far as Amer- ica has produced thinkers, the probability is that our common heritage in the great world-society has had more to do with this development than the peculiar conditions of our home situation. In other words, the physical conditions hold a mortgage upon men's powers which society can never completely discharge. The terms of the obligation may be considerably modified. Indi- viduals and classes may at least be liberated from the most immediate burdens of the conditions, but our title to free action in this world is always subject to Dame Nature's dowry rights, and the accruing dues never fail at last to be collected. For instance, the business of harvesting natural ice and the business of composing poetry alike go on subject to the condi- tions in question ; but if two trusts were formed, the one to con- trol the natural ice market in the United States, and the other the poetry market, the relative attention which all concerned would need to pay to the physical laws limiting supply would be great in the case of the ice, and small in the case of the poetry. This does not prove that poetry is independent of physical conditions, but simply that ice is more directly and exclusively subject to physical conditions. Ability to arrive at a certain approximate working measure of the relative agency of the different conditions concerned in social reactions is thus among the prime desiderata for the sociologist. This ability is
Cf. LECKY, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, pp. 127-9.
