Whatever charges can be brought against the American people, no one has yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-esteem; and though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the philosophers agree that it is the only path to greatness. “The only nations which ever come to be called historic,” says Tolstoi in his “Anna Karenina,” “are those which recognize the importance and worth of their own institutions.” Emerson, putting the thing more tersely, as is his wont, says that “no man can do anything well who does not think that what he does is the centre of the visible universe.” The history of the American republic was really the most interesting in the world, from the outset, were it only from the mere fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a self-governing people in a condition never before witnessed on the globe; and so to this is now added the vaster contemplation of it as a nation of seventy millions rapidly growing more and more. If there is no interest in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to build up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on earth. The time will come when all men will wonder, not that Americans attached so much importance to their national development at this period, but that they appreciated it so little. Canon Zincke has computed that in 1980 the English-speaking population of the globe will number, at the present rate of progress, one thousand millions, and that of this number eight hundred millions will dwell in the United States. No plans can be too far-seeing, no toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing this vast future civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that we must view the immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than fulfill the generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel, “The House with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all the great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”