prising that they were held of small
account in the mother-country. It is not fair to expect the British
critics to understand our political literature, which was until these
later years all we had to show. They had to wait until De Lolme, a Swiss
exile, explained their own Constitution to them, before they had a very
clear idea of it. One British tourist after another visited this
country, with his glass at his eye, and his small vocabulary of "Very
odd!" for all that was new to him; his "Quite so!" for whatever was
noblest in thought or deed; his "Very clever!" for the encouragement of
genius; and his "All that sort of thing, you know!" for the less
marketable virtues and heroisms not to be found in the Cockney
price-current. They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man
got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the
history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until
De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular
comprehension.

The true-born Briton read as far as the first sentence of the second
paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There he stopped, and
there he has stuck ever since. That sentence has been called a
"glittering generality,"--as if there were some shallow insincerity
about it. But because "all that glitters is not gold," it does not
follow that nothing which glitters is gold. Because a statement is
general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical.
"Glittering generality" or not, the voice which proclaimed that the
birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the _fiat lux_ of the
new-born political universe. This, and the terrible series of logical
consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties,
menacing all the hierarchies, undermining the seemingly solid
foundations of all Old-World abuses,--this parent truth, and all to
which it gave birth, made up the literature of Revolutionary America,
and dwarfed all the lesser growths of culture for the time, as the
pine-tree dwarfs the herbage beneath the circle of its spreading
branches.

As English policy had pursued the uniform course of provincializing our
industry during the colonial period, discouraging every form of native
ingenuity, so English criticism, naturally enough, after industry was
set free, discountenanced the growth of a native American literature.
That famous question of the "Quarterly Review," "Who reads an Ame