It is sometimes said that there was never yet a great migration which did not result in some new form of national genius; and this should be true in America, if anywhere. He who lands from Europe on our shores perceives a difference in the sky above his head; the height seems greater, the zenith farther off, the horizon wall steeper. With this result on the one side, and the vast and constant mixture of races on the other, there must inevitably be a change. No portion of our immigrant body desires to retain its national tongue; all races wish their children to learn the English language as soon as possible, yet no imported race wishes its children to take the British race, as such, for models. Our newcomers unconsciously say with that keen thinker, David Wasson, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present?” The Englishman’s strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American’s disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. Washington Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French observer as Chasles a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison, wrote to John Lothrop Motley two years before his own death, “You are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press,—that rising tribunal before which the whole world is to be summoned, its history to be revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past ages to be canceled or confirmed.” For one who can look back sixty years to a time when the best literary periodical in America was called “The Albion,” it is difficult to realize how the intellectual relations of the two nations are now changed. M. D. Conway once pointed out that the English magazines, such as the “Contemporary Review” and the “Fortnightly,” were simply circular letters addressed by a few cultivated gentlemen to the fellow members of their respective London clubs. Where there is an American periodical, on the other hand, the most striking contribution may proceed from a previously unknown author, and may turn out to have been addressed practically to all the world.