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

[79] that hitherto I have thought that, as we in England have to transform our civilization, so America has hers still to make; and that, though her example and co-operation might, and probably would, be of the greatest value to us in the future, yet they were not of much use to our civilization now. I remember, that when I first read the Boston newspaper from which I have been quoting, I was just fresh from the perusal of one of the best of Mr. James's novels, “Roderick Hudson.” That work carries us to one of the “smaller cities of the interior,” a city of which, I own, I had never heard — the American Northampton. Those who have read “Roderick Hudson” will recollect, that in that part of the story where the scene is laid at Northampton, there occurs a personage called Striker, an auctioneer. And when I came upon the Boston newspaper's assurances that, in almost every small town of the Union, I should find “an elegant and simple social order,” the comment which rose to my lips was this: “I suspect what I should find there, in great force, is Striker.” Now Striker was a Philistine.

I have said somewhere or other that, whereas our society in England distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left