A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 67 



this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native soil, 

 and drawing prosperous juices thence, nationality gives the 

 keenest flavour. Mr. Lincoln was an original man, and in so 

 far a great man ; yet it was the Americanism of his every 

 thought, word, and act which not only made his influence 

 equally at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of the 

 outside world, and was the pedestal that lifted him where he 

 could be seen by them. Lincoln showed that native force 

 may transcend local boundaries, but the growth of such 

 nationality is hindered and hampered by our division into so 

 many half-independent communities, each with its objects of 

 county ambition, and its public men great to the borders of 

 their district. In this way our standard of greatness is insen 

 sibly debased. To receive any national appointment, a man 

 must have gone through precisely the worst training for it ; 

 he must have so far narrowed and belittled himself with State 

 politics as to be acceptable at home. In this way a man 

 may become chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs 

 because he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus 

 County, or be sent ambassador to Barataria because he has 

 drunk bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should 

 we e\-er attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the 

 advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and 

 widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two or 

 three that are left if there should be so many. Meanwhile 

 we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small 

 way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its 

 immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage ! 

 Already we are embarrassed, not to find the two, but to 

 choose among the crowd of candidates. Well, seventy- odd 

 heroes in about as many years is pretty well for a young 

 nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal martyr 

 dom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy 

 even native tourists pausing before the greater part of the 

 effigies, and, after reading the names, asking desperately, 

 Whowas/z^? Nay, if they should say, Who the devil 

 was he? it were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as 

 the Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal 

 pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj at 

 Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but 

 Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli shall the in 

 ventor of the sewing-machine, even with the button-holing 



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