I can conceive such a community organized in running order,
powers judiciously delegated--farming, building, trade, courts, mails,
schools, elections, all attended to; and then the rest of life, the
main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and
bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young and old man,
after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality,
develop'd, exercised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can
imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in
buoyant accordance with the municipal and general requirements of our
times. And I can realize in it the culmination of something better
than any stereotyped _eclat_ of history or poems. Perhaps, unsung,
undramatized, unput in essays or biographies--perhaps even some such
community already exists, in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or somewhere,
practically fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest vulgar
life, all that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures.
In short, and to sum up, America, betaking herself to formative
action, (as it is about time for more solid achievement, and less
windy promise,) must, for her purposes, cease to recognize a theory of
character grown of feudal aristocracies, or form'd by merely literary
standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture,
polish, caste, &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard,
yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial elements, and
combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the
democratic, the west, and to the practical occasions and needs of our
own cities, and of the agricultural regions.
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