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Updated: June 29, 2025
The intermixture of Americans is now so great, in consequence of their steamers and railroads, that there is but little pure provincialism left.
But if the Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists have each agreed on the establishment of one educational centre for their students, surely the Catholics can also sacrifice local interests to the welfare of the cause. How many efforts our bigoted provincialism has neutralized in the past! Authoritative leadership only can unite our efforts on this unity of plan of action.
Some teachers seem able to think only of a schoolroom; others of a building; others of a town or township; still others of a state; some of a country; and fewer yet of the world as a single thing. A person can be no larger than his unit of thinking. One who thinks in small units convicts himself of provincialism and soon becomes intolerant.
Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, and with the smallest exertion. Above all, culture is the craving of an experimental age, and America no doubt will outgrow it domination.
An interview at a ticket-office, a whirl of an hour on the rails, and to Portsmouth, anchored yet to the colonial times by a few old houses, and resisting with its respectable provincialism the encroachments of modern smartness, and the sleepy wharf in the sleepy harbor, where the little steamer is obligingly waiting for the last passenger, for the very last woman, running with a bandbox in one hand, and dragging a jerked, fretting child by the other hand, to make the hour's voyage to the Isles of Shoals.
She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion.
This is the usual provincialism of ignorance, and it is found the world over. Especially is it characteristic of centers of population. When men come into contact with men instead of with the forces of nature, they mistake their own conventionalities for the facts of existence. It is not what life is, but what "the singular mess we agree to call life" is, that interests them.
I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom.
Webster's Dictionary indicates a radical misapprehension as to the nature and office of such a work. He calls the result of his labors an "American Dictionary of the English Language," as if provincialism were a merit. He evidently thought that the business of a lexicographer was to regulate, not to record.
Parr's manner a subtle note of patronage. Nor could Hodder's years of provincialism permit him to forget that this man with whom he was about to enter into personal relations was a capitalist of national importance. The neighbourhood they traversed was characteristic of our rapidly expanding American cities.
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