"Hitherto she but plows and hammers," wrote Carlyle of America in 1850. And he was only repeating and summing up the prejudices of innumerable English travellers who had inspected our civilization when he added this painful tribute to the American cousins: "They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, eighteen millions of the greatest bores ever seen in the world before,—that hitherto is their feat in History." That was spoken, as Malvolio says, without much "mitigation or remorse of voice." Yet the American "bore" of 1850, believing still, in spite of himself, in democratic institutions might have heartened his faith by a retrospect over the history of anti-American prophecy. If he had run through a shelf full of the books of travel in the United States written by apprehensive English Tories, he would have observed that the hostile critics of democracy had already shifted their ground. In the earlier years, they prophesied against our political con-
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Education by the People
