ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 



glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at the 

 U. S. A., and forebodes for them a f speedy relapse into bar 

 barism/ now that they have madly cut themselves off from 

 the humanising influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian 

 self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees an 

 unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young giant 

 was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes, 

 was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in Cali 

 fornia, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the scissors 

 and needle and thread ready for Canada when the time 

 came. His shadow loomed like a broken-spectre over against 

 Europe, the shadow of what they were coming to, that was 

 the unpleasant part of it. Even in such misty image as they 

 had of him, it was painfully evident that his clothes were not 

 of any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond 

 Street tailor ; and this in an age, too, when everything de 

 pends upon clothes ; when, if we do not keep up appearances, 

 the seeming solid-frame of this universe, nay, your very God, 

 would slump into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being 

 nothing, after all, but a prevailing mode. From this moment 

 the young giant assumed the respectable aspect of a phe 

 nomenon, to be got rid of if possible, but at any rate as legi 

 timate a subject of human study as the glacial period or the 

 silurian what-d ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval drift- 

 heaps is so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of the 

 drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible 

 current we are just being sucked whether we will or no ? If 

 I were in their place, I confess I should not be frightened. 

 Man has survived so much, and contrived to be comfortable 

 on this planet after surviving so much ! I am something of a 

 Protestant in matters of government also, and am willing to 

 get rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to 

 bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a general 

 agreement to profess confidence in ritual and sham. Every 

 mortal man of us holds stock in the only public debt that is 

 absolutely sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker 

 of this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no 

 notion of selling out my stock in a panic. 



It was something to have advanced even to the dignity of 

 a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the relation of 

 the individual American to the individual European was 

 bettered by it; and that, after all, must adjust itself comfort- 



