It
would be difficult in the case of any other pair of nations, to present
an assemblage of traits at once so common and so distinctive, as has
been given in this probably imperfect enumeration.
There were, however, the strongest reasons why America could not grow
into a reflection or repetition of England. Passing from a narrow island
to a continent almost without bounds, the colonists at once and vitally
altered their conditions of thought as well as of existence, in relation
to the most important and most operative of all social facts, the
possession of the soil. In England, inequality lies embedded in the very
base of the social structure; in America it is a late, incidental,
unrecognized product, not of tradition, but of industry and wealth, as
they advance with various and, of necessity, unequal steps. Heredity,
seated as an idea in the heart's core of Englishmen, and sustaining far
more than it is sustained by those of our institutions which express it,
was as truly absent from the intellectual and moral store, with which
the colonists traversed the Atlantic, as if it had been some forgotten
article in the bills of lading that made up their cargoes.
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