The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
It is very characteristic that the National Church is called an
Establishment,--in other words, something that stays where it was put
some time ago. The thing which ought to move first, and move
continually through all the avenues of the public life, to keep them
clear of the obstructions of ignorance and superstition, and prevent the
great travel and intercourse of thought from stagnating, is the thing in
England which is most unwilling to stir. Already a fearful accumulation
of passengers and vehicles, whose patience is nearly exhausted, is
anxious to be let through in time to keep appointment with the world's
grave business. Young thoughts are hurrying to be indorsed; mature paper
dreads to be protested; the hour of the world's liberal exchange is
about to strike. Depend upon it, at the critical moment, when the
pressure in the rear becomes the most emphatic, the people in the
omnibus will have to get out and assist the passengers in drawing it to
one side, where it will remain a long time unmolested.
But the first thing which you say concerning the men and institutions of
England is, that they are established. In America some things are
finished before they are done; but there are no tottering
trestle-bridges in the routes of English enterprise to let the
travellers through. When a business firm becomes fairly built up, it
lasts a hundred years or more. Shop-signs are not taken down except by
the weather; new fronts grow so slowly along the ancient streets that
they appear to be deposited by secretion, like corals and shells. I took
a book to a printer, and found he was the grandson of the man who
published "Junius" in 1769, doing business in the same dingy court and
office, with the old regularity and deliberation. When I said, that, for
want of time, I should have to risk formidable errata and print at the
rate of sixty-four pages a day, he plainly suspected me of derangement
and of a desire to impart my condition to his machinery. On repeating it
with calmness, he set it down for Yankee braggadocio, and assured me
that not an author in England could print at that rate. Then he went to
work. They detest being hurried, but their latent momentum is very
great. Limited suffrage and many administrative abuses will feel it
soon, as similar things have felt it before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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