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at Newport once vindicated to me the desirableness of liveries on the ground that they were ‘very repressive.’
In persons of higher grade in England there is developed the official—the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord of the Hounds; or the typical hereditary lord, in perhaps two different types, ‘the wicked lord,’ and ‘the good lord;’ but there is no added development of the individual.
It all comes to this, then, that for the development of individuality you must have a free career; and the guarantee of freedom is the first step toward what you seek.
Nowhere will you find a more racy personality than among New England farmers, whose fathers lived before them on the same soil, or perhaps six generations of ancestors, and who, among all restrictions of hard soil and severe competition, have yet kept their separate characteristics.
I have spent summer after summer in the country, and have never yet encountered two farmers alike—two who would not, even if drawn by an unsympathetic though acute observer like Howells, stand out on the canvas with as marked an individuality as Silas Lapham.
It
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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