Helena weekly herald., 1880-08-05
Helena, Montana, Thursday, August $, 1880.
AN ENGLISH VIEW OF AMERICA.

Not American politicians, but individual
Americans, cooperating with boundless
physical resources, have created national
structure unexampled in the history of en-
pires. Englishmen are used to the growth of
towns but, then, it is the nature of England
to be depot and workshop for the world
English towns grow according TO laws pecu-
liar to themselves, and which do not apply
to rural England. 1t American cities grow
fast, the rural population grows faster still.
The increase of London and Liverpool and
Manchester and Birmingham is test of the
increased prosperity of the whole earth
Every addition to New York and Boston and
Philadelphia and San Francisco and Chicago
is evidence that fresh thousands of square
miles of fruitful soil and fresh teeming treas
ures Of mineral wealth are being brought
under human control in the South and the
West. Never was 80 magnificent variety
of potential riches offered to people to utl-
iZe. South America has its infinite stores of
natural wealth, and Asia Minor is to the full
as gifted. Yet they add as little in proper
ton to the worlds store as the United States
adds much. When the resources of the
American Union are catalogued and panegyr-
lied, it is only fair to accredit the American
people with the precise qualities which were
fitted to turn them to their proper account. If
no nation ever entered upon so splendid an
inheritance, none could have put it out to
more profitable usury. American civiliza-
ton suffers in European estimation by its ex-
ternal features appearing to challenge COM
parison with the highest grades of European
culture. When the American million talks
of Carlyle and Tennyson, its critical taste is
ContIasted, naturally not altogether fsvorably,
with the English thousands whose intelligence
has been regularly trained. Quantity and
spread of mental culture are, however, not
,hings to be despised; and in these respects
not Germany itself can match the United
States. AL the paraphernalia of education,
schools and colleges, libraries and museums,
and galleries and institutes, exist in the Uni
ted States in prodigal profusion which de-
fies enumeration. The multitude for whom
these instruments of mental elevation are
prepared may not be able to employ them
with as much profit as leisurely classes in
older countries. But the desire to amass the
apparatus of refinement proceeds from
craving and the sense of a want, which will
not be satisfied until the want itself is sup
Piled On the other hand, for the realiza-
tion of the material prosperity which nature
has placed within their grasp, the masses of
American citizens, to the extreme corner of
the enormous domain they occupy, have de-
veloped faculties and energies which may be
extolied without abatement or drawback.
Rough peasants may insist upon admission
within the veil of all the sciences and all the
arts when it might have been better had they
trained their vision first for the unaccustomed
light But it is different altogether hen the
question OF extracting the utmost bushel of
corn from the soil of Illinois without giving
anything back, of putting the extreme pound
of fat on the Ohio hog, or devising how one
pair of human hands can do the work of
two. Between the American farmer and the
American soil there is sympathy which for
every difficulty finds its solution. In adapt
ing means to ends he displays an unfsiling
instinct which renders the expansion OF his
land in a single century from wilderness
into the worlds treasure house wonder still,
but no longer miracle. A region like that
covered by the United States is the property
not of one person, but of all. Only the usu-
fruct can be claimed by those who occupy it.
1t is hard to imagine North America as ten
anted by Spanisrds or Portuguese, or even
by Frenchmen. Yet so it might
have been. Had it happened that the rule of
the Spaniard had been extended from Mexico
to Vermont, or that the rule of France had
everspread the area between Montreal and
New Orleans, the world would have been in
fnitely poorer. and France or Spain none the
richer. London Times.