The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil.  It is a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.  While the great mass of the people are thus suffering under physical and moral oppression, I have endeavored to examine more nearly the condition of the great, to appreciate the true value of the circumstances in their situation which dazzle the bulk of spectators, and, especially, to compare it with that degree of happiness which is enjoyed in America by every class of people.  Intrigues of love occupy the younger, and those of ambition the elder part of the great.  Conjugal love having no existence among them, domestic happiness, of which that is the basis, is utterly unknown.  In lieu of this, are substituted pursuits which nourish and invigorate all our bad passions, and which offer only moments of ecstacy, amidst days and months of restlessness and torment.  Much, very much inferior, this, to the tranquil, permanent felicity, with which domestic society in America blesses most of its inhabitants; leaving them to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits.

In science, the mass of the people is two centuries behind ours; their literati, half a dozen years before us.  Books, really good, acquire just reputation in that time, and so become known to us, and communicate to us all their advances in knowledge.  Is not this delay compensated, by our being placed out of the reach of that swarm of nonsensical publications, which issues daily from a thousand presses, and perishes almost in issuing?  With respect to what are termed polite manners, without sacrificing too much the sincerity of language, I would wish my countrymen to adopt just so much of European politeness, as to be ready to make all those little sacrifices of self, which really render European manners amiable, and relieve society from the disagreeable scenes to which rudeness often subjects it.  Here, it seems that a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.  In the pleasures of the table they are far before us, because with good taste they unite temperance.  They do not terminate the most sociable meals by transforming themselves into brutes.  I have never yet seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people.  Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I should want words.  It is in these arts they shine.  The last of them, particularly, is an enjoyment, the deprivation of which with us cannot be calculated.  I am almost ready to say, it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which, in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue, I do covet.  But I am running on in an estimate of things infinitely better known to you than to me,