In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak
infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In
business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole
object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in
the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our
magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best
class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and
vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the
visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to
be discover'd, existing crudely and going on in the background, to
advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less
terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success
in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial
popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its
social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and
esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to
empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond
the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California,
Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if
we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more
thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current observations,
localities, &c.
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