She has revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the elephantine backs of the waves.  She has invented the sewing-machine to save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial toil, so that Fifine and Fretillon may have more leisure for self-development.  She has taught you a whole new system of labor in her machinery for making watches and rifles.  She has bestowed upon you and all the world an anodyne which enables you to cut arms and legs off without hurting the patient; and when his leg is off, she has given you a true artist’s limb for your cripple to walk upon, instead of the peg on which he has stumped from the days of Guy de Chauliac to those of M. Nelaton.  She has been contriving well-shaped boots and shoes for the very people who, if they were your countrymen, would be clumping about in wooden sabots.  In works of scientific industry, hardly to be looked for among so new a people she has distanced your best artificers.  The microscopes made at Canastota, in the backwoods of New York, look in vain for their rivals in Paris, and must challenge the best workmanship of London before they can be approached in excellence.  The great eye that stares into the celestial spaces from its workshop in Cambridge, dives deeper through their clouds of silvery dust than any instrument mounted in your observatory in face of the Luxembourg.  Our artisans produce no Gobelin tapestries or Sevres porcelain as yet; but when your mobs have looted the Tuileries, our shopkeepers have bought up enough specimens to serve them as patterns by-and-by.

All this is something for a nation which has hardly pulled up the stumps out of its city market-places.  It is sad to reflect that milliners, like Burgundy, are spoiled by transportation to the headquarters of American fashion.  But as the best bonnet of the Empress’s own artist would be exploded with yells a couple of seasons after the time when it was the rage, the Icarian professor’s flight into the regions of rhetoric has not led him to any very logical resting-place from which he can look down on the aesthetic possibilities of New York or other Western cities emerging from the semi-barbarous state.

We are not proud, of course, of any of the mechanical triumphs we have won; they are well enough, and show—­to borrow the words of a distinguished American, whom, during his too brief career, we held unrivalled by any experimenter in the Old World for the depth as well as the daring of his investigations—­that some things can be done as well as others.

Our specialty is of somewhat larger scope.  We profess to make men and women out of human beings better than any of the joint-stock companies called dynasties have done or can do it.  We profess to make citizens out of men,—­not citoyens, but persons educated to question all privileges asserted by others, and claim all rights belonging to themselves,—­the only way in which the infinitely most important party