No such wide diffusion of the ideas, tastes, and
sentiments of educated minds has ever been seen elsewhere, or even
conceived as attainable.*
* The following "extract from the Report of the English
Commissioner to the New York Exhibition," which I quote from Mr.
Carey's Principles of Social Science bears striking testimony to one
part, at least, of the assertion in the text:-
"We have a few great engineers and mechanics, and a large body of
clever workmen; but the Americans seem likely to become a whole nation
of such people. Already, their rivers swarm with steamboats; their
valleys are becoming crowded with factories; their towns, surpassing
those of every state of Europe, except Belgium, Holland, and
England, are the abodes of all the skill which now distinguishes a
town population; and there is scarcely an art in Europe not carried on
in America with equal or greater skill than in Europe, though it has
been here cultivated and improved through ages. A whole nation of
Franklins, Stephensons, and Watts in prospect, is something
wonderful for other nations to contemplate. In contrast with the
comparative inertness and ignorance of the bulk of the people of
Europe, whatever may be the superiority of a few well-instructed and
gifted persons, the America is the circumstance most worthy of
public attention."
Yet this is nothing to what we might look for in a government
equally democratic in its unexclusiveness, but better organised in
other important points.
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