to be taken unawares, we have
to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse
ourselves of one misconception.

The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the
eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because
circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old
country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very
different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is
in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany
of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the
adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of
citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will
it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have
acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of
forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.
The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was
poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an
embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry
brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all
appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national
unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching
back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by
poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning
either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young
country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in
weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do
as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the
teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was
only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our
standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate
which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are
connected with England by common descent, institutions and language,
although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted
considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young
men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final
training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American
graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French _ecoles_, it would
be easy to count ten doctors