With these, and out of these, I promulge new races of
Teachers, and of perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth-stock
of a New World. For feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions,
though palpably retreating from political institutions, still hold
essentially, by their spirit, even in this country, entire possession
of the more important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education,
and of social standards and literature.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it
founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools,
theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced
anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. It is curious to me
that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms,
in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary
dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor
questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America,
with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one
need, a hiatus the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no
voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with
closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future,
is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors,
literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known,
sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating
the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it
a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far
more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and
underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses--radiating,
begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest
result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and
their clergy have hitherto accomplish'd, and without which this nation
will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand
without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the
political and productive and intellectual bases of the States.
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