s and legs off
without hurting the patient; and when his leg is off, she has given you
a true artist's limb for your cripple to walk upon, instead of the peg
on which he has stumped from the days of Guy de Chauliac to those of M.
Nelaton. She has been contriving well-shaped boots and shoes for the
very people who, if they were your countrymen, would be clumping about
in wooden _sabots_. In works of scientific industry, hardly to be looked
for among so new a people she has distanced your best artificers. The
microscopes made at Canastota, in the backwoods of New York, look in
vain for their rivals in Paris, and must challenge the best workmanship
of London before they can be approached in excellence. The great eye
that stares into the celestial spaces from its workshop in Cambridge,
dives deeper through their clouds of silvery dust than any instrument
mounted in your observatory in face of the Luxembourg. Our artisans
produce no Gobelin tapestries or Sevres porcelain as yet; but when your
mobs have looted the Tuileries, our shopkeepers have bought up enough
specimens to serve them as patterns by-and-by.

All this is something for a nation which has hardly pulled up the stumps
out of its city market-places. It is sad to reflect that milliners, like
Burgundy, are spoiled by transportation to the headquarters of American
fashion. But as the best bonnet of the Empress's own artist would be
exploded with yells a couple of seasons after the time when it was the
rage, the Icarian professor's flight into the regions of rhetoric has
not led him to any very logical resting-place from which he can look
down on the aesthetic possibilities of New York or other Western cities
emerging from the semi-barbarous state.

We are not proud, of course, of any of the mechanical triumphs we
have won; they are well enough, and show--to borrow the words of a
distinguished American, whom, during his too brief career, we held
unrivalled by any experimenter in the Old World for the depth as well as
the daring of his investigations--that some things can be done as well
as others.

Our specialty is of somewhat larger scope. We profess to make men and
women out of human beings better than any of the joint-stock companies
called dynasties have done or can do it. We profess to make citizens out
of men,--not _citoyens_, but persons educated to question all privileges
asserted by others, and claim all rights belonging to themselves,--the
only way in whi