The truth is, that it is not in our institutions, but in our history, that we are to look for the causes of much that is superficially distasteful and sometimes unpleasantly disappointing in our national habits,—­we would not too hastily say in our national character.  Our most incorrigible blackguards, and the class of voters who are at the mercy of venal politicians, have had their training, such as it is, under forms of government and amid a social order very unlike ours.  Disgust at the general dirtiness and corruption of our politics, we are told, keeps all our leading men out of public life.  This appears to us, we confess, a rather shallow misconception.  Our politics are no dirtier or more corrupt than those of our neighbors.  The famous Quam parva sapientia regitur mundus was not said in scorn by the minister of a republic, but in sober sadness by one whose dealings had been lifelong with the courts and statesmen of princes.  The real disgust lies in the selfish passions that are called into play by the strife of party and the small ambitions of public men, and not in any mere coarseness in the expression of them.  We are not an elegant people:  rather less so, on the whole, even in the aristocratic South than in the democratic North.  In this past year of our Lord eighteen hundred sixty-one, we have no doubt, and we shudder to think of it, that by far the larger proportion of our fellow-citizens shovelled their green-peas into their mouths with uncanonical knife-blades, just as Sir Philip Sidney did in a darker age, when yet the “Times” and the silver fork were not.  Nay, let us make a clean breast of all these horrors at once, it is probably true that myriads of fair salmon were contaminated with the brutal touch of steel in scenes of unhallowed family-festival.  The only mitigating circumstance is that such luxuries are within the reach of ten Americans where one European sees them any nearer than through the windows of the victualler.  No, we must yield the point.  We are not an elegant people, least of all in our politics; but we do not believe it is this which keeps our first-rate men out of political life, or that it is the result of our democratic system.

It has been our good-fortune hitherto that our annals have been of that happy kind which write themselves on the face of a continent and in the general well-being of a people, rather than in those more striking and commonly more disastrous events which attract the historian.  We have been busy, thriving, and consequently, except to some few thoughtful people like De Tocqueville, profoundly uninteresting.  We have been housekeeping; and why does the novelist always make his bow to the hero and heroine at the church-door, unless because he knows, that, if they are well off, nothing more is to be made of them?  Prosperity is the forcing-house of mediocrity; and if we have ceased to produce great men, it is because we have not, since we became a nation, been forced to pay the terrible price at which