e
plains, and dam all the rivers on the broad continent. It's a pity
that these Italians hadn't an army of these Western American men to
lead them in their struggle for liberty."

"Do you think they would be better than the French army?"

"The French army!" exclaimed Obed Chute, in indescribable accents.

"Yes. It is generally conceded that the French army takes the lead in
military matters. I say so, although I am a British officer."

"Have you ever traveled in the States?" said Obed Chute, quietly.

"No. I have not yet had that pleasure."

"You have never yet seen our Western population. You don't know it,
and you can't conceive it. Can you imagine the original English
Puritan turned into a wild Indian, with all his original honor, and
morality, and civilization, combining itself with the intense
animalism, the capacity for endurance, and the reckless valor of the
savage? Surround all this with all that tenderness, domesticity, and
pluck which are the ineradicable characteristics of the Saxon race,
and then you have the Western American man--the product of the Saxon,
developed by long struggles with savages and by the animating
influences of a boundless continent."

"I suppose by this you mean that the English race in America is
superior to the original stock."

"That can hardly be doubted," said Obed Chute, quite seriously. "The
mother country is small and limited in its resources. America is not
a country. It is a continent, over which our race has spread itself.
The race in the mother country has reached its ultimate possibility.
In America it is only beginning its new career. To compare America
with England is not fair. You should compare New York, New England,
Virginia, with England, not America. Already we show differences in
the development of the same race which only a continent could cause.
Maine is as different from South Carolina as England from Spain. But
you Europeans never seem able to get over a fashion that you have of
regarding our boundless continent as a small country. Why, I myself
have been asked by Europeans about the health of friends of theirs
who lived in California, and whom I knew no more about than I did of
the Chinese. The fact is, however, that we are continental, and
nature is developing the continental American man to an astonishing
extent.

"Now as to this Lombard war," continued Obed Chute, as Windham stood
listening in silence, and with a quiet smile that relieved but
sli