iltless. But our poor
attempts at culture dwindle to a paltry insignificance in the light of
American enterprise; and we would no more compare the achievement of
England in the diffusion of learning with the achievement of the United
States, than we would set a modest London office by the side of the
loftiest sky-scraper in New York. America lives to do good or evil on a
large scale, and we lag as far behind her in culture as in money-making.

When I left Boston for the West, I met in the train an earnest citizen
of a not uncommon type. He was immensely and ingenuously patriotic.
Though he had never left his native land, and had therefore an
insufficient standard of comparison, he was convinced that America was
superior in arms and arts to every other part of the habitable globe.
He assured me, with an engaging simplicity, that Americans were braver,
more energetic, and richer than Englishmen; that, as their buildings
were higher, so also were their intelligence and their aspirations. He
pointed out that in the vast continent of the West nothing was lacking
which the mind of man could desire. Where, he asked, would you find
harvests so generous, mines so abundant in precious metals, factories
managed with so splendid an ingenuity? If wine and oil are your quest,
said he, you have but to tap the surface of the munificent earth. One
thing only, he confessed, was lacking, and that need a few years
would make good. "Wait," said he, with an assured if immodest
boastful-ness,--"wait until we get a bit degenerate, and then we
will produce a Shakespeare"! I had not the heart to suggest that the
sixteenth century in England was a period of birth, not of decay. I
could only accept his statement in awful appreciation. And emboldened by
my silence, he supported his argument with a hundred ingeniously chosen
facts. He was sure that America would never show the smallest sign of
decadence until she was tired of making money. The love of money was
the best defence against degeneracy of every kind, and he gasped with
simple-hearted pride when he thought of the millions of dollars which
his healthy, primitive compatriots were amassing. But, he allowed, the
weariness of satiety might overtake them; there might come a time when
the ledger and counting-house ceased to be all-sufficient, and that
moment of decay would witness the triumph of American literature. "Ben
Jonson, Goldsmith, and those fellows," he asked, "lived in a degenerate
age,