This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at times we see foreigners assume, declared such mental individualization to be purely American. Vanity, audacity, and self-appreciation exist among all peoples, and even from the banks of the Isis we hear how the late Dr. Jowett averred, “I am the Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the first college in Oxford; Oxford is the first city in England; England is the first country in the world.” United with the feeling of personal worth and independence in this citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another characteristic--namely, a great tolerance. He could hardly expect tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our national constitution. But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of quality--that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic values--his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy, allow no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of differentiation, is no natural endowment, but a result of training, mental elimination, comparison, association, and a dwelling in inherent spiritual values. Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have this quality if he “had time” and seclusion for thought. But his life makes it possible for an explosive and heated talker, a mouther of platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his esteem with a seer of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His estimate of even lighter publicities is tinctured by this defect--the theatrical, for instance, where a verdant girl, lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the money she inherited from a father’s patent syrup or pills, and an actress of genius and experience fall in his mind in the same category because a theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each. What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and non-sagacious judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in character--mark, peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the word in the Phædrus--would be hard to estimate. Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He is apt to fall into the thinking lines of writers of nameless editorials, who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip at quiet folk as “parochial celebrities” and “small deer.” And yet he knows that he lives in an age of réclame, and that by the expenditure of a few dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a name may be set before more people than our forefathers numbered on the first Independence Day.