ABSTRACT
In this matter of absentee ownership the case of America is peculiar in some respects, although the special features of the case are not such that it departs from the main line of the development in any material degree. Indeed, it might rather be said that America shows this development in the freest and fullest shape which it has anywhere attained hitherto. The special circumstances which have conditioned its growth in this country have brought the institution more swiftly to a more stable and mature state here than elsewhere. So that absentee ownership has become the master institution in American civilisation, speedily and summarily, with slighter reservations than in the older civilised nations. In this particular, at least, America may be said to stand at the apex of cultural growth among the peoples of Christendom. And America is followed closely by the other, newer peoples that have come up out of European colonisation; although it is doubtful if any of them will have the fortune to overtake America. There is some ground for thinking that these others may have made too late a start, so that an undue proportion of other ideals and principles, alien to the perfect dominance of absentee ownership, may be included in the effectual drift of popular sentiment in these other cases. But so far these others are coming along very nicely, and there is perhaps no ground for serious apprehension.
