Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[21] called ‘The Murder of the Innocents,’¹ being simply to caution this more nervous race against overworking their children in school; an aim which was certainly as far as possible from what Mr. Arnold calls ‘tall talk and self-glorification.’ If a nation is not to be saved by pointing out is own physiological perils, what is to save it?

As a matter of fact, it will be generally claimed by Americans, I fancy, that whatever else their much-discussed nation may have, it has at least developed a temperament for itself; ‘an ill-favored thing, but mine own,’ as Touchstone says of Audrey. There is no vanity or self-assertion involved in this, any more than when a person of blond complexion claims not to be a brunette or a brunette meekly insists upon not being regarded as fair-haired. If the American is expected to be in all respects the duplicate of the Englishman, and is only charged with inexpressible inferiority in quality and size, let us know it; but if two hundred and fifty years of transplantation under a new sky and in new conditions have made any difference