to contemplate
the rise and progress of the union in so short a period since the
declaration of independence.

An Irish gentleman, apparently a clergyman, last year favoured the
public with the result of an extensive tour in Canada and the United
States, in "Letters from America."

He starts in his preface with these remarkable expressions, which must
be well considered and analyzed, because they are the deliberate
convictions of an observant and well-informed man, who had, moreover,
singular opportunities of reflecting upon the people he had so long
travelled amongst.

He says that "In energy, perseverance, enterprise, sagacity, activity,
and varied resources" the Americans infinitely surpass the British;
that he never met with "a stupid American." That our "American children"
surpass us not only in our good, but "in our evil peculiarities." This I
cannot understand; for, surely, if we have _peculiarities_, which there
is no denying, they must by all the rules of logic be limited to
ourselves.

But the writer observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that
they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation
of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the
worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher
branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic
faculty--what an abominable word aesthetic is! it always puts me in mind
of asthmatic, for it is broken-winded learning.

"Is it not common," says he, "in modern England to reject authorities
both in Church and State, to look with contempt on the humbler and more
peculiarly christian virtues of contentment and submission, and to
cultivate the intellectual at the expense of the moral part of our
nature? If these and other dangerous tendencies of a similar nature are
at work among ourselves, as they undoubtedly are, it is useful and
interesting to observe them in fuller operation and more unchecked
luxuriance in America."

Now, it is very satisfactory, that the Americans, a race of yesterday,
who have had no opportunity as yet of coping with the deep research and
master-minds of Europe, should in half a century have leaped into such a
position in the civilized world as to have exceeded the Englishman in
all the most useful relations of life, as well as in all its darker and
more dangerous features; very satisfactory indeed that the mixed race
peopling the United States should be better