74 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here and there 

 in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and 

 had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Can- 

 ada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a 

 Brocken-spectre over against Europe, — the shadow of 

 what they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part 

 of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, it 

 was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any 

 cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond 

 Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when everything 

 depends upon clothes, when, if we do not keep up ap- 

 pearances, the seeming-solid frame of this universe, nay, 

 your very God, would slump into himself, like a mockery 

 king of snow, being nothing, after all, but a prevailing 

 mode. From this moment the young giant assumed the 

 respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of if 

 possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of human 

 study as the glacial period or the silurian what-d'ye-call- 

 ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps is so ab- 

 sorbingly interesting, why not the man of the drift that 

 is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible cur- 

 rent we are just being sucked whether we will or no 1 If 

 I were in their place, I confess I should not be fright- 

 ened. Man has survived so much, and contrived to be 

 comfortable on this planet after surviving so much ! I 

 am something of a protestant in matters of government 

 also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and cere- 

 monies and to come down to bare benches, if only faith 

 in God take the plo/^;e of a general agreement to profess 

 confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us 

 holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely 

 sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of 

 this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no 

 notion of selling oflt my stock in a panic. 



It was something to have advanced even to the dignity 



