Quotation by Harry C. Allen

If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.