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farm to every man, woman, and child in the nation. Then, our ambassadors were besieging European çapitalists and governments for a hundred thousand dollars; now, the nation distributes at once forty millions of surplus revenue; bears four hundred millions of debt without feeling it, and sells the privilege of lending to her at six and ten cents for every dollar that she will condescend to borrow. Then, we had no manufactures; now, we have more than five hundred millions of dollars invested in manufactories, whose annual productions are worth more than a thousand millions of dollars. Our cotton manufactories alone, while the English millmen confess that the business in Great Britain has reached its very utmost capacity of development, are now employing eighty millions of capital, are using thirty-five millions of dollars' worth a year of raw material, and turning out a yearly product worth seventy millions of dollars, and yet are steadily increasing, while we compete with our English rivals in our own market, and all over the world. Then, we had neither commerce nor shipping; now, it is not long since we dismantled a national warship to send her, laden with the superabundance of our rich fields, to stay the famine in Ireland. Of the same overflowing plenty we have imparted to the starving people of Greece, of Madeira, of the Azores. Our cotton crop, besides supplying the immense home demand just stated, is sent across the sea at the rate of eleven hundred millions of pounds a year, and, after being manufactured, supplies the primary human necessity of clothing to all nations, from the tropic to the pole, from the Englishman to the Chinese.

The extent of the shore line of the United States, on the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Mexican Gulf, is about twelve thousand miles. The northern and southern boundaries amount to at least six thousand more; making, in all, eighteen thousand miles-equal to three quar

ters of the distance around the world.

Now we have the largest mercantile marine on earth. Fourteen hundred steamers, measuring five hundred thousand tons, and seventeen thousand sail vessels, registering four and a half millions of tons burden, besides carrying a portion of our enormous mass of inter

nal exchanges, are bringing yearly from abroad three hundred millions of tons of foreign, and carrying away two hundred and eighty millions of domestic merchandise.

These vast totals, indicating such limitless resources and such superhuman energy, and demonstrating only the aggregate of the resources in territory and riches wielded by our population, constituting the greatest force on earth, yet only refer to physical power, and do not by any means give a comprehensive view even of that power. However important our pecuniary wealth and material power at this present moment may be, as securing to us a high station and commanding influence in the great commonwealth of nations, there are other departments in our national life, of profoundly greater significance. The state of our intellectual, social, and moral development, after all, is of infinitely more importance than our property per head, or our annual revenue. These mere acquisitions may easily depreciate in value. Our vast mass of wealth naturally tends, of itself, to be scattered and lost. It is the mind and the soul which inform and impel the people of our country, which constitute their real character, which alone can determine their lasting prosperity, even in respect to dollars and cents, and which certainly are the only basis upon which can be raised or maintained a collective or individual character which can justify our national pride, or command the respect of strangers.

Our condition in these respects-the intelligence and morality of our native population; the social condition of the nation-is such as to inspire every patriotic heart with an exultation infinitely loftier and purer than any boasts of riches or displays of strength. The right training of our citizens for their duties to God and the State, has ever been a principal object of our government. It is true that the main regulation of this subject, and the direction of the chief expenditure

*The statistics of the machinery employed in manufacturing-a very important and significant item-although actually collected, are kept strangely concealed in the Census Office; nor is there any adequate estimate, yet compiled, of the total machinery of all kinds owned and used in the United States.

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for it, rests in the States individually; yet the Federal Government alone, doing what it could constitutionally do, has given outright, for educational purposes, fifty-three millions of acres of land, which, even at the minimum Government price, are worth nearly seventy millions of dollars. Of public funds alone, besides the much greater amount paid by individuals, there are paid for education annually, in the United States, at least seven and a half millions of dollars. There is no child so poor or vile as to be excluded from a good school education; and if any children miss it, the fault is that of their parents or themselves. In our schools are taught, not only the rudiments of literature, but pure morals, and the elements of a just and manly character. Entire freedom in true and right thought is encouraged; and the result of our school systems, which are confessedly the best extant, is such as fully to uphold their claim to superiority. In those parts of the country where they have reached their completest development, only one native in four hundred is unable to read or write. In the far northern State of Maine, there are more children at school, in proportion to the population, than in any other state, kingdom, or country whatever. In the whole United States, the proportion of school-going youth is only exceeded by that in Denmark, where attendance is enforced by law.

The tone of our national life throughout is such as to maintain the intelligent independence and self-controlling activity, which our citizens learn in their childhood. No policeman, or spy, or uniformed soldier prohibits our people from discussing the measures of government. We are not holden by force to follow the commands of hereditary despots. We consider and inquire to our heart's content what we would have the government do, and then vigilantly watch its execution. No such broad political freedom was ever heard of before, either in Greece or Rome, in Switzerland or England. The diffusion of current information, and of intercourse among our citizens, has increased to a corresponding extent. The fecundity and ability of our newspaper press is without parallel. The best and brightest talent of the day is increasingly employed in this business. In 1775, there were

thirty-five newspapers in the whole country. That number is now more than equalled in each of four single towns, and in two of them it is tripled. In the whole country there are twenty-two hundred newspapers, circulating a hundred and fifty millions of copies annually; and of periodicals of all kinds, more than twenty-seven hundred, circulating nearly four hundred and thirty millions of copies a year. A single American monthly circulates more copies than all the magazines of Great Britain together. Our Post-office Department, which, upon its re-establishment after the Revolution, enumerated about seventyfive post-offices, along a few coast-routes of some two thousand miles, upon which it was thought remarkable that the mail came through from New York to Philadelphia in three days, now numbers twentyfive thousand post-offices, and sends its mail-bags over two hundred and twenty thousand miles of roads. Seventy years since, steamboat speed was impossible; and railroads were not even conceived of in dreams. Now our letters hurry along the water, in steamboats, at twenty miles an hour, and fly across the land, by railroad, at fifty miles an hour. But that is not enough for our restless people. It will not do to wait for time, or to measure space. So forty-two thousand miles of telegraph bring Maine and Louisiana-New York and St. Louis, within moments of each other, for the merchants who cannot let their messages lag along on lightning trains. Nay, the intervening space of the Atlantic Ocean is to be annihilated. The wires are now being prepared for the ocean line, between Newfoundland and Ireland; and the unreasonable philosopher, Faraday, not content that messages will be delivered in New York three hours before they are dispatched at Liverpool, is grumbling in England because there is to be an actual delay of two minutes.

The same keen and disciplined, but tremendous energy which has driven us so swiftly onward in our career of material prosperity, and which is yet surging hither and thither across the continent in accumulating waves, has operated alike in all departments of human action. Not only have we excelled in the mere organization of human industry and the gathering of riches, but Americans have

stood pre-eminent in every domain of original thought, in every sphere of labor, physical or mental. It would be too long a story to enumerate the daring of our exploring seamen; the exhaustless fertility and practical adaptedness of our myriads of inventors; the triumphs of our mechanics, who have surpassed the world in making whatever can be made, that requires beauty, strength, or skilful handling. Their enormous clippers dash through the billows of every sea, and their engineers go abroad to construct monster railroads for foreign powers. Their brass clocks tick within the households of every nation, from England to China; their pistols are arming the officers and soldiers of all civilized troops.

In science and literature, even more than in such conquests over the material world, has our career been rapid and our attainment glorious. In all those departments of literary labor which are related to the present needs and future progress of humanity—in theology, ethics, law, politics, political economy, education, natural sciences, history, romance, poetry-we are at least fully abreast of the very

foremost.

Even in the fine arts, hitherto always the latest blossom of civilizations which have been refining for centuries, we have risen up suddenly to the highest position. Our sculptors and painters are rivalling the modern masters of artistic Italy, amidst the very shrines of the muses, and the homes of the arts.

In all the realms of thought, both elegant and profound, we have quietly surprised the elder nations out of supercilious contempt and thorough ignorance, into admiring acknowledgment. A quarter of a century ago, the assumption was coolly and currently made throughout Great Britain, that English writers were sure of the monopoly of the American market for an indefinite period. Since English authors were good enough, why should we meddle with pen, ink, and paper, as long as we could be busy in raising raw material to support the manufacturing monopolies of Manchester and Leeds? It was taken for granted that we could not write either prose or poetry worth reading.

"We have changed all that." The works of Story and Kent, and

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