Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/765

 -1776] State of law in the eighteenth century. 733 which they were surrounded. As a reasoner, whether dealing with others or communing with himself, he was vigorous, honest, and so shrewd that the expanse of his common-sense extended to the verge of genius. In versatile rationality he never had a superior. But, on the whole he never quite completed his typical nationality by such sympathetic understanding of ideal philosophy as underlay both the theological abstractions of Edwards and the political generalisations of the statesmen of the Revolution. In that eighteenth century America, in which the independent life of the United States had its origin, the older fusion of ideals and of practical conduct had evidently begun to give way. The aspects of American character on which we have now touched may be taken, on the whole, as comprehensive. Edwards typifies the older theology, divorced from life as Church and State began to trend apart, but still vigorous in that intensity of idealism which had been from the beginning what it remains to-day the true spiritual force of America. The statesmen of the Revolution show how a modified form of that same idealism could underlie schemes of legal and political conduct, which on the surface seem at odds with the ideals they are supposed to express and to justify. And finally, the consummate rationality of Franklin typifies, more admirably still, that phase of American character which, while not insensitive to the influence of pure ideals, can adapt itself and devote its energies to the advancement not of abstract science but of the practical conduct of life. The question now before us is how these national characteristics, of which we have tried to trace the origin and the development, have displayed themselves since the Revolution. This question we may conveniently consider under the separate headings of law, philosophy, literature, art, science, and education. As we have already seen, the state of law in America, when the Revolution occurred, was peculiar. Nominally the law of England prevailed from New Hampshire to Georgia. Each of the colonies mean- while had a legislature of its own ; each had its own Courts, and had long ago begun to establish an unwritten law of its own. This unwritten law, however, was everywhere stated in terms which assumed it to be the law of England itself. Accordingly, hardly anyone, on either side of the Atlantic, understood how, under the new conditions of colonial life, a number of customs unknown in England had acquired in America the fall force of constitutional sanction. This peculiar condition of affairs, which has not yet been much studied in detail, lay at the bottom of the deep mutual misunderstandings which resulted in the independence of America. Something similar has persisted in the United States to this day. The settlement of the West, which began well before the nineteenth century, and which is hardly yet complete, has been accompanied every- CH. XXIII.