from the love of
brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him
as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry
the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as
they give and such harm as they do.

These are traits, and measures, and modes; and the true test of
civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the
crops,--no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast
advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate zone.
I see the immense material prosperity,--towns on towns, states on
states, and wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities,
California quartz-mountains dumped down in New York to be re-piled
architecturally along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to
California again. But it is not New-York streets built by the confluence
of workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out towards
Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they touch New
Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston,--not these that
make the real estimation. But, when I look over this constellation of
cities which animate and illustrate the land, and see how little
the Government has to do with their daily life, how self-helped and
self-directed all families are,--knots of men in purely natural
societies,--societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual
hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion, of
longer or better-directed industry, the refining influence of women,
the invitation which experience and permanent causes open to youth and
labor,--when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person whom all men
consider lives affectionately with scores of excellent people who are
not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason reckons these
people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry and force of their
qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and in these a better
certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous wealth.

In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual
steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh,--in
Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates,
and of the Stoic Zeno,--in Judea, the advent of Jesus,--and in modern
Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal
facts which carry forward races to new convictions, and elevate