First, what is his pedigree?  He need not be ashamed to tell; for he comes of a noble family, the Teutonic,—­a family more opulent of human abilities, and those, for the most part, the deeper kind of abilities, than any other on the earth at present.  He reckons among his progenitors and relatives such names as Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, the two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen, Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner; and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the supreme ones in each class have been mentioned.  Consider what incomparable range and variety, as well as depth, of genius are here affirmed.  Greece and India possessed powers not equally represented here; but otherwise these might stand for the full abilities of mankind, each in its handsomest illustration.—­It is remarkable, too, that our Anglo-American has no “poor relations.”  Not a scurvy nation comes of this stock.  They are the Protestant nations, giving religion a moral expression, and reconciling it with freedom of thought.  They are the constitutional nations, exacting terms of government that acknowledge private right. Resource may also be emphasized as a characteristic of these nations.  Hitherto they have honored every draft that has been made upon them.  The Dutch first fished their country out from under the sea, and afterwards defended it in a war of eighty years’ duration against the first military power on the globe:  two feats, perhaps, equally without parallel.

Being thus satisfied upon the point of pedigree, we may proceed to inquire about estate.  To what inheritance of land has Nature invited our New Man?  He comes to the country of highest organization, perhaps, upon either hemisphere.  Brazil and China suggest, but probably do not sustain, a rivalry.  What is implied in superior organization will appear from the items to be mentioned.

1.  Elaboration.  Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley, in undulating prairie and fertile plain,—­not tossed into barren mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert plateau which stretches through Central Asia,—­not struck out in blank, like the Russian steppes and the South American llanos, as if Nature had wanted leisure to elaborate and finish.  Indeed, these primary conditions of fertility and large habitability appertain to America, as a whole, to such degree, that, with less than half the extent of the Old World, it actually numbers more acres of fertile soil, and can, of course, sustain a larger population.

2.  Unity.  Between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the northern wheat-limit, a larger space of fertile territory, embracing a wider variety of climate and production, is thrown into one mass, broken by no barrier, than can, perhaps, elsewhere be found.