66 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



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 pain 

 fully 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 depends 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 

 legitimate 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 con 

 trived 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 pro 

 fess 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 com 

 fortably before there can be a right understanding between 

 the two. We had been a desert, we became a museum. 

 People came hither for scientific and not social ends. The 



