The race, in truth, grows mongrel,
and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the
fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage of
reaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensible
standards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that go
with inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland among the civilized
nations, but it took Scotland a century and a half to live down the
Reformation.[78] Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of
rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people,
uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction.[79] A
cultured European, reading a typical American critical journal, must
needs conceive the United States, says H. G. Wells, as "a vain,
garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still more
uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an
ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant
of Christendom."[80] There is always that blushful shyness, that
timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of
impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck.
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