78 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



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 martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimina 

 tion. We fancy even native tourists pausing before the 

 greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the names, 

 asking desperately, &quot; Who was he ? &quot; Nay, if they should 

 say, &quot; Who the devil was he ? &quot; it were a pardonable 

 invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act 

 as cicerone among such palpable obscurities. We recall the 

 court-yard of the Ufnzj at Florence. That also is not free 

 of parish celebrities; but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, 

 Macchiavelli shall the inventor of the sewing machine, 

 even with the button-holing improvement, let us say, match 

 with these, or with far lesser than these ? Perhaps he was 

 more practically useful than any one of these, or all of them 

 together, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some 

 where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ; so 

 were the greater part of Plutarch s heroes. Did they have 

 a better chance than we moderns than we Americans? 

 At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess 

 that 



By bed and table they lord it o er us, 

 Our elder brothers, but one in blood.&quot; 



Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is our 

 provincialism then in some great measure due to our 

 absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meanin^ 

 the material to our habit of estimating greatness by the 

 square mile and the hundredweight ? Even during our war, 

 in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were 

 not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar 

 habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles 

 it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to 



