Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. CHAPTER I. PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AMERICANS. AMERICANS POSSESS A STRONG INSTINCT OF,PUGNACITY —THEY ARE SELF-ASSERTIVE AND BOASTFUL—BLIND TO OBVIOUS SHORTCOMINGS—SELF-RELIANT—MANIFEST STRONG ANTIPATHIES—CHARACTER OF AMERICAN WIT AND HUMOR—CONSERVATISM—ALTRUISM— IDEALISM—MENTAL AND MORAL TEMPERAMENT— OVER-STRENUOUS LIFE LEADS TO DISCONTENT AND RESTLESSNESS. Foreign critics seem to agree in the opinion that the Americans possess psychological characteristics different from those of any other people. "No one who has traveled, as I have," says Alexander Francis, "in Australia and South Africa as well as in America, can fail to realize that the American, in a sense which does not apply to British colonists, has been made over into a new man by the new mode of life which he has embraced, and the new government which he obeys, in his new land—a man who acts upon new ideas, new principles and new prejudices in the new world which he hasmade his own—a man in whom the climate and other potent factors of his new physical environment have wrought a new psychological type, while the more subtle influences of a new continent, which he has almost to himself, and in which he has long been kept practically free from contact and entanglement with the Old World, were producing a type intellectually and morally new." In seeking to define the peculiarities of this new type, we are led to note, in the first place, that one of the characteristics of the Americans, conspicuous in all Teutonic races, and especially accentuated in the English, is a very strong degree of pugnacity. This has been developed among the Teutonic races in their long history of warfare, and in their struggle for existence in a climate which requires strenuous physical and menta...