Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a vast
seething mass of _materials_, ampler, better, (worse also,) than
previously known--eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning
stage, and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future,
the nation of the body and the soul,[32]--no limit here to land,
help, opportunities, mines, products, demands, supplies, etc.;--with
(I think) our political organization, National, State, and Municipal,
permanently establish'd, as far ahead as we can calculate--but, so
far, no social, literary, religious, or esthetic organizations,
consistent with our politics, or becoming to us--which organizations
can only come, in time, through great democratic ideas,
religion--through science, which now, like a new sunrise, ascending,
begins to illuminate all--and through our own begotten poets and
literatuses. (The moral of a late well-written book on civilization
seems to be that the only real foundation-walls and bases--and also
_sine qua non_ afterward--of true and full civilization, is the
eligibility and certainty of boundless products for feeding, clothing,
sheltering everybody--perennial fountains of physical and domestic
comfort, with intercommunication, and with civil and ecclesiastical
freedom--and that then the esthetic and mental business will take care
of itself. Well, the United States have establish'd this basis, and
upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity, rivaling
those of Nature; and have now to proceed to build an edifice upon
it.
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