386 Landscape Gardening 



dom of a community of genial influences, without the un- 

 utterable pang of not having been introduced to the company 

 present. 



These social doubters who thus intrench themselves in 

 the sole citadel of exclusiveness in republican America, mis- 

 take our people and their -destiny. If we would but have 

 listened to them our magnificent river and lake steamers, 

 those real palaces of the million, would have had no velvet 

 couches, no splendid mirrors, no luxurious carpets. Such 

 costly and rare appliances of civilization, they would have 

 told us, could only be rightly used by the privileged fami- 

 lies of wealth, and would be trampled upon and utterly 

 ruined by the democracy of the country who travel one 

 hundred miles for half a dollar. And yet these, our floating 

 palaces and our monster hotels, with their purple and fine 

 linen, are they not respected by the majority who use 

 them, as truly as other palaces by their rightful sovereigns? 

 Alas, for the faithlessness of the few, who possess, regarding 

 the capacity for culture of the many, who are wanting. 

 Even upon the lower platform of liberty and education that 

 the masses stand in Europe, we see the elevating influences 

 of a wide popular enjoyment of galleries of art, public 

 libraries, parks and gardens, which have raised the people 

 in social civilization and social culture to a far higher level 

 than we have yet attained in republican America. And yet 

 this broad ground of popular refinement must be taken in 

 republican America, for it belongs of right more truly here 

 than elsewhere. It is republican in its very idea and tend- 

 ency. It takes up popular education where the common 

 school and ballot-box leave it, and raises up the working 

 man to the same level of enjoyment with the man of leisure 

 and accomplishment. The higher social and artistic ele- 

 ments of every man's nature lie dormant within him, and 

 every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession 

 of money or fine clothes, but through the refining influence 

 of intellectual and moral culture. Open wide, therefore, the 

 doors of your libraries and picture galleries, all ye true 

 republicans! Build halls where knowledge shall be freely 



