Americans pride themselves on their courage and individuality and brag of the frontier virtues, but the fact is we are the most cowardly race in the world socially. Read Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance and ask yourself honestly how much you dare to be yourself. He has been called the most essentially American of our authors, but would he be so[Pg 300] today? The old phrases have a familiar ring. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle.” “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” “Life only avails, not the having lived.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Every schoolboy knows them, but how many mature Americans dare to practise them? Take the matter of clothes as a simple touchstone of individuality. Every American woman who goes to London is either shocked, interested or amused by the variety of women’s dress there. Most of it, except sports clothes, is, I admit, extremely bad, but the point is that a woman dresses just as she pleases. Little girls may have long black stockings or legs bare to their full length; older women may have skirts that display the knee or drag the ground; hats of the latest mode from Paris, or from Regent Street when Victoria was a girl. Watching the passing crowd on the Broad Walk is like turning the pages of Punch for half a century. A man may wear any headgear from a golf cap to a pearl satin “topper.” Compare this, for example, with New York and the mass antics of the Stock Exchange where if a man wears a straw hat beyond the day appointed by his fellows they smash it down over his eyes, and where he is not safe from similar moronic hoodlumism even in the streets. I mention clothes not as a Sartor Resartus but merely as a simple instance of that mass-mindedness which permeates all American life. One has to fight to be one’s self in America as in no other country I know. Not only are most Americans anxious to conform to the standards of the majority, but that majority, and the advertisers, insist that they shall.[Pg 301] I recall some years ago when living in a small village and when I was spending many hundreds of dollars more than I could well afford on books and also putting money into travel, that more than one of the village people actually suggested to me that it was rather disgraceful for a man in my position not to drive a better car than a Ford. My answer, of course, was that I did not give a rap about a car except as a means to get about, and I did care about books and travel. Another man, one from the city, speaking of the same sore point, said that I could afford to use a Ford because everyone knew who my grandfather was, but he had to have something better to meet his guests with. In another community, a moderately wealthy friend of mine who had a large house, also a country place, and did a good deal of traveling, was