Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[186] Protestanism, as the orthodox Protestant sects present it, the grand remedy for the deficiencies and dangers of America. On this I offer no criticism; what struck me, and that on which I wish to lay stress, is, the writer's entire failure to perceive that such self-glorification and self-deception as I have been mentioning is one of America's dangers, or even that it is self-deception at all. He himself shares in all the self-deception of the average man among his countrymen; he flatters it. In the very points where a serious critic would find the Americans most wanting he finds them superior; only they require to have a good dose of evangelical Protestantism still added. “Ours is the elect nation,” preaches this reformer of American faults--“ours is the elect nation for the age to come. We are the chosen people.” Already, says he, we are taller and heavier than other men, longer lived than other men, richer and more energetic than other men, above all, “of finer nervous organization” than other men. Yes, this people, who endure to have the American newspaper for their daily reading, and to have their habitation in Briggsville, Jacksonville, and Marcellus — this people is of finer, more delicate nervous organization than other nations! It is Colonel Higginson's “drop more of nervous ”