ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 51 



casm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. We had 

 nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to brag 

 ging overmuch of our merely material prosperity, due quite 

 as much to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There 

 was some truth in Carlyle s sneer after all. Till we had 

 succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the 

 success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of 

 enormous Russia, was greatness on the map barbarian mass 

 only ; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in 

 some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin s 

 point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal 

 spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At 

 the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that 

 material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, 

 that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must 

 be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our 

 shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never would have 

 thought of asking, Who reads a Russian book ? and Eng 

 land was satisfied with iron from Sweden without being 

 impertinently inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. 

 Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle 

 of Freedom ? Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make 

 men of flesh and blood, and not the marble ideals of such ? 

 It may be fairly doubted whether we have produced this 

 higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the collective, not the 

 individual, humanity that is to have a chance of nobler de 

 velopment among us. We shall see. We have a vast 

 amount of imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native 

 ready-made knowledge, to digest before even the preli 

 minaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We 

 have got to learn that statesmanship is the most complicated 

 of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship-system 

 too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust a man with 

 making constitutions on less proof of competence than we 

 should demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We 

 have nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old 

 notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station as 

 qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme point 

 in the opposite direction, putting the highest of human func 

 tions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capable of 

 going upright on two legs. In some places, we have arrived 

 at a point at which civil society is no longer possible, and 

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