ld culture. Yet in that very epoch
when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious
verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_
(June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of
our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by
the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away
from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and
looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native
American literature? Here is the passage:--

"We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper,
but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners
and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life
seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper
currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may
be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the
country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone
cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the
hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way,
and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world
with greater advantage."

From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one
may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic
radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the
French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really
believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the
Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the
writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism
which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the
English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators
played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic
principles has never been adequately acknowledged.

That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas
as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no
stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual
aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot
Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that
no gentlema