uousness; yet
these new edifices demand annually from twelve to fifteen millions.

Next come the religious societies. In the West, preachers are needed,
hardy laborers, who live in privations, traversing vast solitudes on
horseback, and journeying continually, without repose, until their
strength is exhausted. Eight hundred missionaries or agents are required
for the American Board of Missions, for the Presbyterians, the Baptists,
and all the other churches. Now, they cannot send them to the four
quarters of the globe without providing for their wants. The Bible
Society, which prints three hundred thousand Bibles annually, the
Religious Tract Society, which publishes every year five millions of
tracts, and which, in New York alone, employs a thousand visitors or
distributors; the various works, in a word, expend from nine to ten
million francs.

Such, then, is the budget of voluntary charity in the United States.[A]
It amounts to fifty or sixty million francs, without counting the very
considerable donations destined to public instruction; without counting
(and this is immense) the relief of the sick and the poor. You will
scarcely find a village in the whole United States that has not its
benevolent society, and private benevolence, which is the best, also
carries on its work, independently of societies. I know of no country
where acts of profuse liberality are more frequent; one man founds a
hospital, another an observatory. Asylums are opened for all human
unfortunates, for lunatics, the blind, the deaf, orphans, abandoned
children.

Was I not right in saying that this is a great people? Whatever may be
its vices, we are not at liberty to speak of it with disdain. If the
Americans know how to make a fortune, they know, also, how to make a
noble use of their fortune; accused with reason, as they are, of being
too often preoccupied with questions of profit, we have seen them
retrenching much of their luxury since the commercial crisis, yet
economizing very little in their charities. The budget of the churches
and religious societies remained intact at the very time that
embarrassment was everywhere prevailing. I cannot help believing that
there are peculiar blessings attached to so many voluntary sacrifices
which carry back the mind to the early ages of Christianity. We may be
sure that the religion that costs something, brings something also in
return.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: It seems that I have understate