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The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and the delights of learning. He must make himself more felt in the material life of this country. I am aware that it is said that the culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and more decorous animality of the more fortunate. Without entering directly upon the consideration of this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the influence upon our present and probable future of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary opportunities of this still new land.

The American grows and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. This apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great cities towards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We shall excel the English when we have as long practice as they. I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the immortal thirst of the country. We take, indeed, strong hold of the earth; we absorb its fatness. When Leicester entertained Elizabeth at Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetually at twelve, the hour of feasting. It is always dinner-time in America. I do not know how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a quarter section. He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish and a handful of olives. The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied. He is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He is temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws not more of his life from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky. He would never build a Pacific Railway, nor write a hundred volumes of commentary on the Scriptures; but he is an example of how little a man actually needs of the gross products of the earth.

I suppose that life was never fuller in certain ways than it is here in America. If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough. A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on what one American family consumes and wastes. The revenue required for the wardrobe of one woman of fashion would suffice to convert the inhabitants of I know not how many square miles in Africa. It absorbs the income of a province to bring up a baby. We riot in prodigality, we vie with each other in material accumulation and expense. Our thoughts are mainly on how to increase the products of the world; and get them into our own possession.