88 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



tional appointment, a man must have gone through pre- 

 cisely the worst training for it ; he must have so far 

 narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to 

 be acceptable at home. In this way a man may become 

 chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, because 

 he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus County, 

 or be sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk 

 bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should 

 we ever attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the 

 advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and 

 widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two 

 or three that are left, if there should be so many. 

 Meanwhile 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 candi- 

 dates. 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 indiscrimination. We fancy even native tourists paus- 

 ing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after 

 reading the names, asking desperately, "Who was he?" 

 Nay, if they should say, " Who the devil was he ? " it 

 were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the 

 Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal- 

 pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj 

 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 1 Perhaps he was more prac- 

 tically useful than any one of these, or all of them to- 

 gether, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some- 

 where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ; 



