A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 79 



the motive that gave it all its meaning and its splendour ? 

 Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that passion 

 of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or 

 Perham. &quot; I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but 

 when I m mad I weigh two ton,&quot; said the Kentuckian, with 

 a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That ideal kind of 

 weight is wonderfully increased by a national feeling, 

 whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men 

 go into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and 

 the Englishman in modern times, have been most conscious 

 of this representative solidity, and wherever one of them 

 went there stood Rome or England in his shoes. We have 

 made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, 

 by the breadth of its proportions and the implacability of 

 its demands, forced us to admit a truer valuation, and gave 

 us ; in our own despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed 

 for such by all the world. The harder problems it 

 has left behind may in time compel us to have great 

 statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the 

 next election. The criticism of Europe alone can 

 rescue us from the provincialism of an over or false 

 estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry, 

 that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has 

 so often been impressed upon base metal, that we cannot 

 expect it to be taken on trust, but we may be sure that true 

 gold will be equally persuasive the world over. Real 

 manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial, 

 but enter the select society of all time on an even footing. 



Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look 

 into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolu 

 tion while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers of 

 whoever attempts intervention, have also their great men, 

 as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe. 

 The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar 

 might allay many motus animorum, if rightly pondered. 

 Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in Italy, and his 

 biographer tells us that, &quot; near Castiglione he was present 

 at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns 



