They want good farmers, sailors, mechanics,
clerks, citizens--perfect business and social relations--perfect
fathers and mothers. If we could only have these, or their
approximations, plenty of them, fine and large and sane and generous
and patriotic, they might make their verbs disagree from their
nominatives, and laugh like volleys of musketeers, if they should
please. Of course these are not all America wants, but they are first
of all to be provided on a large scale. And, with tremendous errors
and escapades, this, substantially, is what the States seem to have an
intuition of, and to be mainly aiming at. The plan of a select class,
superfined, (demarcated from the rest,) the plan of Old World lands
and literatures, is not so objectionable in itself, but because it
chokes the true plan for us, and indeed is death to it. As to such
special class, the United States can never produce any equal to the
splendid show, (far, far beyond comparison or competition here,) of
the principal European nations, both in the past and at the present
day. But an immense and distinctive commonalty over our vast and
varied area, west and east, south and north--in fact, for the first
time in history, a great, aggregated, real PEOPLE, worthy the name,
and made of develop'd heroic individuals, both sexes--is America's
principal, perhaps only, reason for being. If ever accomplish'd, it
will be at least as much, (I lately think, doubly as much,) the result
of fitting and democratic sociologies, literatures and arts--if we
ever get them--as of our democratic politics.
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