He has never said of his own countrymen the comfortable things that he tells of the English; but we need not grumble at that. The father who is severe with his own children will freely admire those of others, for whom he is not responsible. Emerson is stern toward what we are, and arduous indeed in his estimate of what we ought to be. He intimates that we are not quite worthy of our continent; that we have not as yet lived up to our blue china. "In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not." And he adds that even our more presentable public acts are due to a money-making spirit: "The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great West from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional philanthropy on record." He does not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings of the people who went to California in 1849, though he admits that "California gets civilized in this immoral way," and is fain to suppose that, "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston? Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread-eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech," he proceeds to speculate whether "the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out?" He finds the foible especially of American youth to be--pretension; and remarks, suggestively, that we talk much about the key of the age, but "the key to all ages is imbecility!" He cannot reconcile himself to the mania for going abroad. "There is a restlessness in our people that argues want of character.... Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?" He finds, however, this involuntary compensation in the practice--that, practically "we go to Europe to be Americanized," and has faith that "one day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the passion for America." As to our political doings, he can never regard them with complacency. "Politics is an afterword," he declares--"a poor patching. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education." He sympathizes with Lovelace's theory as to iron bars and stone walls, and holds that freedom and slavery are inward, not outward conditions. Slavery is not in circumstance, but in feeling; you cannot eradicate the irons by external restrictions; and the truest way to emancipate the slave would be to educate him to a comprehension of his inviolable dignity and freedom as a human being. Amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement. "Nothing is more