66 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



In the natural course of things we succeeded to this 

 unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had 

 thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we 

 could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly 

 did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved 

 some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors 

 in office. We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, 

 and were given to bragging overmuch of our merely ma- 

 terial prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our 

 continent as to our own. There was some truth in Car- 

 lyle'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 ideal tri- 

 umphs, 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, " Who reads a Russian 

 book 1 " 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 ? Is it not the highest 

 art of a Republic to make men of flesh and blood, and 

 not the 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 knowl- 



