The world would be in a poor case indeed if it had not always before it some ideal or millennial condition, some panacea, some transmutation of base metals into gold, some philosopher’s stone, some fountain of youth, some process of turning charcoal into diamonds, some scheme for eliminating evil.  But it is worth mentioning that in the historical evolution we have always got better things than we sought or imagined, developments on a much grander scale.  History is strewn with the wreck of popular delusions, but always in place of them have come realizations more astonishing than the wildest fancies of the dreamers.  Florida was a disappointment as a Bimini, so were the land of the Ohio, the land of the Mississippi, the Dorado of the Pacific coast.  But as the illusions, pushed always westward, vanished in the light of common day, lo! a continent gradually emerged, with millions of people animated by conquering ambition of progress in freedom; an industrial continent, covered with a network of steel, heated by steam, and lighted by electricity.  What a spectacle of youth on a grand scale is this!  Christopher Columbus had not the slightest conception of what he was doing when he touched the button.  But we are not satisfied.  Quite as far from being so as ever.  The popular imagination runs a hard race with any possible natural development.  Being in possession of so much, we now expect to travel in the air, to read news in the sending mind before it is sent, to create force without cost, to be transported without time, and to make everybody equal in fortune and happiness to everybody else by act of Congress.  Such confidence have we in the power of a “resolution” of the people and by the people that it seems feasible to make women into men, oblivious of the more important and imperative task that will then arise of making men into women.  Some of these expectations are only Biminis of the present, but when they have vanished there will be a social and industrial world quite beyond our present conceptions, no doubt.  In the article of woman, for instance, she may not become the being that the convention expects, but there may appear a Woman of whom all the Aspasias and Helens were only the faintest types.  And although no progress will take the conceit out of men, there may appear a Man so amenable to ordinary reason that he will give up the notion that he can lift himself up by his bootstraps, or make one grain of wheat two by calling it two.

One of the Biminis that have always been looked for is an American Literature.  There was an impression that there must be such a thing somewhere on a continent that has everything else.  We gave the world tobacco and the potato, perhaps the most important contributions to the content and the fatness of the world made by any new country, and it was a noble ambition to give it new styles of art and literature also.  There seems to have been an impression that a literature was something indigenous or ready-made, like any other