CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 



given to bragging overmuch of our merely material pros 

 perity, 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 real 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, 

 &quot; Who reads a Russian book 1 &quot; and England 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 1 

 Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of 

 flesh and blood, and not to make marble ideals of such 1 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 

 development 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 prelim 

 inaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We 

 have got to learn that statesmanship is the most com 

 plicated 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 



