As in Europe the wealth of
to-day mainly results from, and represents, the rapine, murder,
outrages, treachery, hoggishness, of hundreds of years ago, and
onward, later, so in America, after the same token--(not yet so bad,
perhaps, or at any rate not so palpable--we have not existed long
enough--but we seem to be doing our best to make it up.)
Curious as it may seem, it is in what are call'd the poorest, lowest
characters you will sometimes, nay generally, find glints of the most
sublime virtues, eligibilities, heroisms. Then it is doubtful whether
the State is to be saved, either in the monotonous long run, or in
tremendous special crises, by its good people only. When the storm
is deadliest, and the disease most imminent, help often comes from
strange quarters--(the homoeopathic motto, you remember, _cure the
bite with a hair of the same dog.)_
The American Revolution of 1776 was simply a great strike, successful
for its immediate object--but whether a real success judged by the
scale of the centuries, and the long-striking balance of Time, yet
remains to be settled. The French Revolution was absolutely a strike,
and a very terrible and relentless one, against ages of bad pay,
unjust division of wealth-products, and the hoggish monopoly of a few,
rolling in superfluity, against the vast bulk of the work-people,
living in squalor.
If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also
to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic,
miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late
years--steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of
lungs or stomach--then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all
its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.
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