ithout it. In an age when periwigs made so large a
part of the natural dignity of man people with such a turn of mind
were dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and hateful?

[Footnote 38: From the essay entitled "On a Certain Condescension in
Foreigners," printed in "From My Study Windows." Copyright, 1870,
1871, 1890, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton, Mifflin
Company.]

In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unenviable
position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well,
and there was hope that we could at least contrive to worry along. And
we certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved
some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. We had
nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to bragging
overmuch of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much to the
virtue of our continent as to our own. There was some truth in
Carlyle's sneer after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way
than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness,
like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map--barbarian mass
only; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast
cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on the chart of
memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and
cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily
forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal
triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must
be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming.
The _Edinburgh Review_ never would have thought of asking, "Who reads
a Russian book?" and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden
without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters and
statuaries. Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle
of freedom? Is it not the highest art of a republic to make men of
flesh and blood, and not the marble ideals of such? It may be fairly
doubted whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps
it is the collective, not the individual humanity that is to have a
chance of nobler development among us. We shall see. We have a vast
amount of imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made
knowledge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a
consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn that statesmanship
is the most complicated of a