Before, however, any sufficiently great and capable body of men can be found to abolish these shams, these shams that must necessarily hamper and limit the development of our children, it is necessary that they should have some clear idea of the thing that is to follow, and the real security of these obsolete institutions lies very largely in the fact that at present the thing that is to follow does not define itself. It is too commonly assumed that the alternative to a more or less hereditary government is democratic republicanism of the American type, and the defence of the former consists usually in an indictment of the latter, complicated in very illogical cases by the assertion (drawn from the French instance) that Republics are unstable. But it does not follow that because one condemns the obvious shams of the British system that one must accept the shams of the United States. While in Great Britain we have a system that masks and hampers the best of our race under a series of artificial inequalities, the United States theory of the essential equality of all men is equally not in accordance with the reality of life. In America, just as in England, the intelligent child grows up to discover that the pretensions of public life are not justified, and quite equally to be flawed in thought and action by that discovery. The American atmosphere has one great and indisputable superiority over the British: it insists upon the right of every citizen, it almost presents it as a duty, to do all that he possibly can do; it holds out to him even the highest position in the state as a possible reward for endeavour. Up to the point of its equality of opportunity surely no sane Englishman can do anything but envy the American state. In America “presumption” is not a sin. All the vigorous enterprise that differentiates the American from the Englishman in business flows quite naturally from that; all the patriotic force and loyalty of the common American, which glows beside the English equivalent as the sun beside the moon, glows even oppressively. But apart from these inestimable advantages I do not see that the American has much that an Englishman need envy. There are certainly points of inferiority in the American atmosphere, influences in development that are bad, not only in comparison with what is ideally possible, but even in comparison with English parallels.