152 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



These social doubters who thus intrench themselves in the sole 

 citadel of exclusiveness in republican America, mistake our people 

 and their destiny. If we would but have listened to them, our mag- 

 nificent river and lake steamers, those real palaces of the million, 

 would have had no velvet couches, no splendid mirrors, no luxurious 

 carpets. Such costly and rare appliances of civilization, they would 

 have told us, could only be rightly used by the privileged families 

 of wealth, and would be trampled upon and utterly ruined by the 

 democracy of the country, who travel one hundred miles for half a 

 dollar. And yet these, our floating palaces and our monster hotels, 

 with their purple and fine linen, are they not respected by the ma- 

 jority who use them, as truly as other palaces by their rightful sov- 

 ereigns ? Alas, for the faithlessness of the few, who possess, regarding 

 the capacity for culture of the many, who are wanting. Even upon 

 the lower platform of liberty and education that the masses stand 

 in Europe, we see the elevating influences of a wide popular enjoy- 

 ment of galleries of art, public libraries, parks and gardens, which 

 have raised the people in social civilization and social culture to a 

 far higher level than we have yet attained in republican America. 

 And yet this broad ground of popular refinement must be taken in 

 republican America, for it belongs of right more truly here, than 

 elsewhere. It is republican in its very idea and tendency. It takes 

 up popular education where the common school and ballot-box leave 

 it, and raises up the working-man to the same level of enjoyment 

 with the man of leisure and accomplishment. The higher social 

 and artistic elements of every man's nature lie dormant within him, 

 and every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession of 

 money or fine clothes but through the refining influence of intel- 

 lectual and moral culture. Open wide, therefore, the doors of your 

 libraries and picture galleries, all ye true republicans ! Build halls 

 where knowledge shall be freely diffused among men, and not shut up 

 within the narrow walls of narrower institutions. Plant spacious 

 parks in your cities, and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of 

 morning to the whole people. As there are no dark places at noon 

 day, so education and culture the true sunshine of the soul will 

 banish the plague spots of democracy ; and the dread of the igno- 

 rant exclusive who has no faith in the refinement of a republic, will 



