Timothy is a valuable servant. Redtop and clover are a degree higher in the social scale. But the king of them all, with genuine blood royal, is Blue Grass. Taine, in his incomparable History of English Literature, has well said that the body of man in every country is deeply rooted in the soil of nature. He might properly have declared that men were wholly rooted in the soil, and that the character of nations, like that of forests, tubers, and grains, is entirely determined by the climate and soil in which they germinate.
Dogmas grow like potatoes.
Creeds and carrots, catechisms and cabbages, tenets and turnips, religions and rutabagas, governments and grasses, all depend upon the dew point and the thermal range. Give the philosopher a handful of soil, the mean annual temperature and rainfall, and his analysis would enable him to predict with absolute certainty the characteristics of the nation. Calvinism transplanted to the plains of the Ganges would perish of inanition. Webster is as much an indigenous product of New England as its granite and its pines. The direct agency upon which all these conditions depend, and through which these forces operate, is food.