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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



spicuous, that the common citizen, educate 

 him as you like, will habitually occupy him- 

 self with his personal affairs, and hold it 

 not worth his while to fight against each 

 abuse as soon as it appears. Not lack of 

 information, but lack of certain moral sen- 

 timents, is the root of the evil. 



You mean that people have not a sufficient 

 sense of public duty ? 



Well, that is one way of putting it; 

 but there is a more specific way. Probably 

 it will surprise you if I say that the Ameri- 

 can has not, I think, a sufficiently quick 

 sense of his own claims, and at the same 

 time, as a necessary consequence, not a suffi- 

 ciently quick sense of the claims of others 

 for the two traits are organically related. 

 I observe that you tolerate various small 

 interferences and dictations which English- 

 men are prone to resist. I am told that the 

 English are remarked on for their tendency 

 to grumble in such cases; and I have no 

 doubt it is true. 



Do you think it worth while for people to 

 make themselves disagreeable by resenting 

 every trifling aggression? We Americans 

 think it involves too much loss of time and 

 temper, and doesn't pay. 



Exactly. That is what I mean by char- 

 acter. It is this easy-going readiness to 

 permit small trespasses because it would be 

 troublesome or profitless or unpopular to 

 oppose, which leads to the habit of acquies- 

 cence in wrong, and the decay of free in- 

 stitutions. Free institutions can be main- 

 tained only by citizens each of whom is in- 

 stant to oppose every illegitimate act, every 

 assumption of supremacy, every official ex- 

 cess of power, however trivial it may seem. 

 As Hamlet says, there is such a thing as 

 greatly to find quarrel in a straw, where 

 that straw implies a principle. If, as 

 you say of the American, he pauses to con- 

 sider whether he can afford the time and 

 trouble " whether it will pay " corruption 

 is sure to creep in. All these lapses from 

 higher to lower forms begin in trifling 

 ways ; and it is only by incessant watchful- 

 ness that they can be prevented. As one 

 of your early statesmen said, " The price of 

 liberty is eternal vigilance." But it is far 

 less against foreign aggressions upon na- 

 tional liberty, that this vigilance is required, 



than against the insidious growth of domes- 

 tic interferences with personal liberty. In 

 some private administrations which I have 

 been concerned with, I have often insisted, 

 much to the disgust of officials, that instead 

 of assuming, as people usually do, that 

 things are going right until it is proved that 

 they are going wrong, the proper course is to 

 assume that they are going wrong until it is 

 proved that they are going right. You will 

 find, continually, that private corporations, 

 such as joint-stock banking companies, come 

 to grief from not acting upon this principle. 

 And what holds of these small and simple 

 private administrations, holds still more of 

 the great and complex public administra- 

 tions. People are taught, and, I suppose, 

 believe, that "the heart of man is deceit- 

 ful above all things and desperately wick- 

 ed " ; and yet, strangely enough, believing 

 this, they place implicit trust in those 

 they appoint to this or that function. 

 I do not think so ill of human nature ; but, 

 on the other hand, I do not think so well of 

 human nature as to believe it will do with- 

 out being watched. 



You hinted that while Americans do not 

 assert their own individualities sufficiently in 

 small matters, they, reciprocally, do not suffi- 

 ciently respect the individualities of others. 



Did I? Here, then, comes another of 

 the inconveniences of interviewing. I should 

 have kept this opinion to myself if you had 

 asked me no questions ; and now I must 

 either say what I do not think, which I can 

 not, or I must refuse to answer, which per- 

 haps will be taken to mean more than I in- 

 tend, or I must specify, at the risk of giving 

 offense. As the least evil I suppose I must 

 do the last. The trait I refer to comes out 

 in various ways, small and great. It is 

 shown by the disrespectful manner in which 

 individuals are dealt with in your journals 

 the placarding of public men in sensational 

 headings, the dragging of private people 

 and their affairs into print. There seems to 

 be a notion that the public have a right to 

 intrude on private life as far as they like ; 

 and this I take to be a kind of moral tres- 

 passing. It is true that during the last few 

 years we have been discredited in London 

 by certain weekly papers which do the like 

 (except in the typographical display) ; but 

 in our daily press, metropolitan and pro- 



