lly increased by a national
feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men go
into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in
modern times, have been most conscious of this representative solidity,
and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or England in his shoes.
We have made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, by the
breadth of its proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced
us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own despite, great
soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all the world. The harder
problems it has left behind may in time compel us to have great
statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the next election. The
criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provincialism of an
over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry,
that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been
impressed upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken on
trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be equally persuasive the
world over. Real manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial,
but enter the select society of all time on an even footing.

Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. Those
Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolution while the powder lasts,
and sure to burn the fingers of whoever attempts intervention, have also
their great men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe.
The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay
many _motus animorum_, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was
travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that "near Castiglione
he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns
defiling into the plain large enough to contain sixty thousand men. The
throne was situated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and
Napoleon on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and his
companions, who were at the base of the hill. The hero Caesar could not
imagine that he beheld the liberator of the world of Columbus!" And
small blame to him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the only
foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great
Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow
across the vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of
the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the