During the early years of our history as an independent nation, the imitators of foreign and civilized usages, the well-bred people of our country were, as I have indicated, regarded as out of sympathy with the population at large, and there was a certain justification in the charge; for though there was no conscious slur on the part of these students of manners, they were at fault in that they failed to manifest or to take an interest in that energy, originality, and freshness of mental vision which was known as Americanism. Blatant and mortifying as this national tendency was in its exaggerated forms, it was a genuine indigenous product typical of the native character. Chastened and subdued in New England, and assuming outrageous expression on the prairies, it was the real manifestation of our entity as a new departure from the peoples of Europe. Hence it was natural that those who were shocked by or felt no kinship for this trick of the blood should be looked at askance. Among those who claimed in their own hearts social prestige it was long the fashion to shrug their shoulders over the raw eccentricities of their fellow-countrymen, which, as revealed both in public affairs and during European travel, were often startling to precise taste and wofully suggestive of the boaster. Yet those very traits in their truer expression have been the vital force of the people, and give us our savor as a nation. Not to possess them is to be without the characteristics of an American. The experience and events of fifty years have served to soften the eccentricities and tone down the unconventional manifestations of the national spirit. Although the prairies and the halls of Congress still afford occasional rampant types, the great body of the people is eager, as I have indicated, to adopt cosmopolitan usages. But the salt of the native character remains undiluted in the blood of the people, and marks them as genuinely as ever, though they have learned to avoid some of the exuberance of language and look which made foreigners smile, and their sensitive countrymen blush when they met them in the picture galleries of Europe.