[7] Unfortunately this precaution does not fulfil its purpose; universal suffrage is a political fallacy: and will be one of the stumbling-blocks in the path of this country's greatness. I do not mean that it will lessen her wealth, or injure her commercial and financial resources; but it will be an insuperable bar to the progress of mental and intellectual cultivation--'tis a plain case of action and reaction. If the mass, _i. e._ the inferior portion, (for when was the mass not inferior?) elect their own governors, they will of course elect an inferior class of governors, and the government of such men will be an inferior government; that it may be just, honest, and rational, I do not dispute; but that it ever will be enlarged, liberal, and highly enlightened, I do not, and cannot, believe. [8] I do not know whether his honour the Recorder's information applied only to the state of New York, or included all the others; 'tis not one of the least strange features which this strange political process, the American government, presents, that each state is governed by its own laws; thus forming a most involved and complicated whole, where each part has its own individual machinery; or, to use a more celestial phraseology, its own particular system. [9] Whoever pretends to write any account of "Men and Manners" in America must expect to find his own work give him the lie in less than six months; for both men and manners are in so rapid a state of progress that no record of their ways of being and doing would be found correct at the expiration of that term, however much so at the period of its writing. Broadway is not only partly Macadamised since first we arrived here, but there are actually to be seen in it now two or three carriages of decent build, with hammercloths, foot-boards, and even once or twice lately I have seen footmen standing on those foot-boards!!! [10] Perhaps one reason for the perfect coolness with which a fire is endured in New York is the dexterity and courage of the firemen: they are, for the most part, respectable tradesmen's sons, who enlist in this service, rather than the militia; and the vigilance and activity with which their duty is discharged deserves the highest praise. [11] I have lately read Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. In that wonderful analysis of the first work of our master-mind by his German peer, all has been said upon this subject that the most philosophical reason, or poetical imagination, can suggest; and who that has read it can forget that most appropriate and beautiful simile, wherein Hamlet's mind is likened to an acorn planted in a porcelain vase--the seed becomes living--the roots expand--and the fragile vessel bursts into a thousand shivers!