which shows that the author did not intend what his language seems to mean. Thus the implication of the above statement is partially removed a few pages later (II, 202-3). There is a similar case in connection with the account of our presidential elections (I, 102). Omission of possible contrasts between electoral and popular majorities seems to mar the description. Presently, however (I, 138), the omission is supplied. So with a rather broad generalization about the social standing of atheism (II, 194). The case of Colonel Ingersoll at once came to my mind in qualification. That very case is cited in the next sentence but one. Such slight blurs are unavoidable when so many details are to be brought into a single picture.
Then reference should be made to a class of propositions dogmatically stated as facts, while in reality they represent merely provincial judgments. In this group I would place the assertion (I, 75) that "no single principle of the constitution has been altered during the first century of the nation's existence." Some of us, who do not believe in state sovereignty as a principle, nevertheless agree with its American champions that the history of the United States will not be correctly written until it starts with recognition that our constitution could not have been adopted if rights of primogeniture had not been tacitly conceded to the principle of state sovereignty. But the most characteristic case under this head occurs in the author's treatment of the intellectual life of America. If he had been to the manner born, he could not have given a more delicious tinge of Bostonian local color than in the naive declaration (II, i): "America has three capital cities, Washington for its politics, New York for its business, and Boston for its intellect!" No American is likely to challenge Professor Münsterberg's account, in the following paragraphs, of the historical relation of Massachusetts to the Puritan element in Americanism. In my mind's eye, however, are rather lively images of the superb scorn of the Old Dominion, for instance, at the treatment of Puritanism as the only factor in American thought worth noticing. Whatever may have been true in the past, the amiable conceit that Boston retains its relative influence in American life overtaxes the gravity of all but the Bostonese. There are Americans of this generation who began to live in Boston, but who later lived larger elsewhere. To assert that America looks to Boston for its intellectual direction is very much like saying that the Atlantic Ocean depends for its water supply on the Charles River.
More prominent than either of these accidents is the dangerously
