hundred sixty-one, we have no doubt,
and we shudder to think of it, that by far the larger proportion of
our fellow-citizens shovelled their green-peas into their mouths with
uncanonical knife-blades, just as Sir Philip Sidney did in a darker age,
when yet the "Times" and the silver fork were not. Nay, let us make a
clean breast of all these horrors at once, it is probably true that
myriads of fair salmon were contaminated with the brutal touch of
steel in scenes of unhallowed family-festival. The only mitigating
circumstance is that such luxuries are within the reach of ten Americans
where one European sees them any nearer than through the windows of the
victualler. No, we must yield the point. We are not an elegant people,
least of all in our politics; but we do not believe it is this which
keeps our first-rate men out of political life, or that it is the result
of our democratic system.

It has been our good-fortune hitherto that our annals have been of that
happy kind which write themselves on the face of a continent and in the
general well-being of a people, rather than in those more striking and
commonly more disastrous events which attract the historian. We have
been busy, thriving, and consequently, except to some few thoughtful
people like De Tocqueville, profoundly uninteresting. We have been
housekeeping; and why does the novelist always make his bow to the hero
and heroine at the church-door, unless because he knows, that, if they
are well off, nothing more is to be made of them? Prosperity is the
forcing-house of mediocrity; and if we have ceased to produce great men,
it is because we have not, since we became a nation, been forced to pay
the terrible price at which alone they can be bought. Great men are
excellent things for a nation to have had; but a normal condition that
should give a constant succession of them would be the most wretched
possible for the mass of mankind. We have had and still have honest and
capable men in public life, brave and able officers in our army and
navy; but there has been nothing either in our civil or military history
for many years to develop any latent qualities of greatness that may
have been in them. It is only first-rate events that call for and mould
first-rate characters. If there has been less stimulus for the more
showy and striking kinds of ambition, if the rewards of a public career
have been less brilliant than in other countries, yet we have shown,
(and this i