s a legitimate result of democracy,) perhaps beyond the
measure of other nations, that plebeian genius for the useful which has
been chiefly demanded by our circumstances, and which does more than war
or state-craft to increase the well-being and therefore the true glory
of nations. Few great soldiers or great ministers have done so much for
their country as Whitney's cotton-gin and McCormick's reaper have done
for ours. We do not believe that our country has degenerated under
democracy, but our position as a people has been such as to turn our
energy, capacity, and accomplishment into prosaic channels. Physicians
call certain remedies, to be administered only in desperate cases,
_heroic_, and Providence reserves heroes for similar crises in the body
politic. They are not sent but in times of agony and peril. If we have
lacked the thing, it is because we have lacked the occasion for it.
And even where truly splendid qualities have been displayed, as by our
sailors in the War of 1812, and by our soldiers in Mexico, they have
been either on so small a scale as to means, or on a scene so remote
from European interests, that they have failed of anything like
cosmopolitan appreciation. Our great actors have been confined to what,
so far as Europe is concerned, has been a provincial theatre; and an
obscure stage is often as fatal to fame as the want of a poet.

But meanwhile has not this been very much the case with our critics
themselves? Leading British statesmen may be more accomplished scholars
than ours, Parliament may be more elegantly bored than Congress; but we
have a rooted conviction that commonplace thought and shallow principles
do not change their nature, even though disguised in the English of
Addison himself. Mr. Gladstone knows vastly more Greek than Mr. Chase,
but we may be allowed to doubt if he have shown himself an abler
finance-minister. Since the beginning of the present century it is safe
to say that England has produced no statesmen whom her own historians
will pronounce to be more than second- or third-rate men. The Crimean
War found her, if her own journalists were to be believed, without a
single great captain whether on land or sea, with incompetence in every
department, civil and military, and driven to every shift, even to
foreign enlistment and subsidy, to put on foot an army of a hundred
thousand men. What an opportunity for sermonizing on the failure of
representative government! In that war En