A GKEAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 89 



SO were the gi^eater part of Plutarch's heroes. Did they 



have a better chance than we moderns, — than we 



Americans 1 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." 



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, 

 meaning the material, — to our habit of estimating 

 gi'eatness by the square mile and the hundred weight ? 

 Even during our war, in the midst of that almost unri- 

 valled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspa- 

 pers 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 the motive 

 that gave it all its meaning and its splendor ? Perhaps 

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

 patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum 

 or Perham. " I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, 

 but when I 'm mad I weigh two ton," said the Ken- 

 tuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdujDois. That 

 ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a na- 

 tional 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 



