Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/286

276 sense of finish and proportion. It is not Scottish, for they are too canny to waste even emotion without some definite return. The Irish have a humor that saves them from ridicule, though it does not endow them with the needed balance-wheel of wisdom. The sentiment of Germany overruns proper bounds, but is not reflected in the leading examples of American self-written biography. The American expression is peculiar, a proper accompaniment of a territory almost without limits. Virgin land at settlement, it had a strong influence on those who came to it. Its symbol is a screaming eagle, and who would blame an eagle for screaming in boundless space? Every American claims the right of free utterance. As a child he has used it, as a man he has abused it, the only restraint being a wholesome fear of the law of libel or an appeal to the medieval and murderous code of honor. Even this right of utterance is quite modern.

Censorship of the press, one stage in the development, is an historical survival, and in English-speaking countries (except Ireland) is merely of historical importance. Liberty "to know, to utter and to argue" Milton placed above all other liberties; but so long as it could be interpreted by an autocratic ruler, by virtue of an undefined general prerogative, the liberty existed only in name. Sir Thomas More in his Utopia made it punishable by death to speak against the ruling power, and by one of those strange sequences of events he was himself brought to trial for countenancing the pretensions of a nun who was charged with treasonable language. Freedom came slowly, and such was the effect of the supervision of the press that under the Restoration the newspaper press was practically reduced to the London Gazette—an official and inspired organ. In two centuries and a half such interferences have been abolished. While Great Britain has, after its fashion, never rested the freedom of the press on law but on its unwritten constitution, the United States have gloried in its recognition in their bills of right, an essential part of their constitutions. The price paid is a confusion of tongues, a multiplicity of opinion which produces indigestion, and an absence of standards which permits the glorification of the seamy and the sordid as freely as of the great and the admirable. Laudation of self and institutions is justified by accomplishment, and if it is pitched in too high a key is excusable by its honesty.

One compensation may be found in this discordant circle of self-praise, filial praise, and disciple praise. The note is unharmonious even in development. There has not long existed a studied