his achievements the
continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the
most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great
cities towards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. If ever man took
large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own
use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We
shall excel the English when we have as long practice as they. I am
filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago
and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the
prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands
are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the
immortal thirst of the country. We take, indeed, strong hold of the
earth; we absorb its fatness. When Leicester entertained Elizabeth at
Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetually at twelve,
the hour of feasting. It is always dinner-time in America. I do not know
how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a
quarter section. He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above
all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and
strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the
hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and
from a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish and a handful of
olives. The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some
cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied. He
is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would
pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose
family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He is
temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws not more of his life
from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky. He would never build
a Pacific Railway, nor write a hundred volumes of commentary on the
Scriptures; but he is an example of how little a man actually needs of
the gross products of the earth.

I suppose that life was never fuller in certain ways than it is here in
America. If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly
highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor
houses enough, nor food enough. A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on
what one American family consumes and wastes. The revenue required for