alone they can be bought.  Great men are excellent things for a nation to have had; but a normal condition that should give a constant succession of them would be the most wretched possible for the mass of mankind.  We have had and still have honest and capable men in public life, brave and able officers in our army and navy; but there has been nothing either in our civil or military history for many years to develop any latent qualities of greatness that may have been in them.  It is only first-rate events that call for and mould first-rate characters.  If there has been less stimulus for the more showy and striking kinds of ambition, if the rewards of a public career have been less brilliant than in other countries, yet we have shown, (and this is a legitimate result of democracy,) perhaps beyond the measure of other nations, that plebeian genius for the useful which has been chiefly demanded by our circumstances, and which does more than war or state-craft to increase the well-being and therefore the true glory of nations.  Few great soldiers or great ministers have done so much for their country as Whitney’s cotton-gin and McCormick’s reaper have done for ours.  We do not believe that our country has degenerated under democracy, but our position as a people has been such as to turn our energy, capacity, and accomplishment into prosaic channels.  Physicians call certain remedies, to be administered only in desperate cases, heroic, and Providence reserves heroes for similar crises in the body politic.  They are not sent but in times of agony and peril.  If we have lacked the thing, it is because we have lacked the occasion for it.  And even where truly splendid qualities have been displayed, as by our sailors in the War of 1812, and by our soldiers in Mexico, they have been either on so small a scale as to means, or on a scene so remote from European interests, that they have failed of anything like cosmopolitan appreciation.  Our great actors have been confined to what, so far as Europe is concerned, has been a provincial theatre; and an obscure stage is often as fatal to fame as the want of a poet.

But meanwhile has not this been very much the case with our critics themselves?  Leading British statesmen may be more accomplished scholars than ours, Parliament may be more elegantly bored than Congress; but we have a rooted conviction that commonplace thought and shallow principles do not change their nature, even though disguised in the English of Addison himself.  Mr. Gladstone knows vastly more Greek than Mr. Chase, but we may be allowed to doubt if he have shown himself an abler finance-minister.  Since the beginning of the present century it is safe to say that England has produced no statesmen whom her own historians will pronounce to be more than second- or third-rate men.  The Crimean War found her, if her own journalists were to be believed, without a single great captain whether on land or sea, with incompetence in every