And so John Smith finds appropriate place, not only in every history, but a special niche and chapter to himself. We might perhaps have put this select mention of a great public benefactor, an erudite scholar, and universal toiler, into a note, smothered up in an appendix, dimmed by the milky-way of small asterisks, and hazily obscured by countless references and authorities; but this injustice to the merits of an ancient family, whose tombs mound every churchyard, and whose door-plates shine on almost every house in our cities and towns not appropriated to drugs, groceries, or confectioneries, would, we are persuaded, sorely wound the public conscience. The origin of the Smiths, like that of so many other distinguished families, is involved in distressing doubt. Audacious investigation, with a natural wish to penetrate to the roots, and too fearless of consequences where prudence perhaps might be better satisfied with a limited view of ancestry, has pressed its inquiries up and down genealogical trees until it has unearthed Smiths at the base, Smiths in the sap, Smiths up the stump, and even Smiths dangling at the end of the branches. No nation looks down in theory from such lofty heights of indifference upon ancestral distinctions as the American; none can better afford to cut down their genealogical, as they do their natural, forests; yet none are so fond of looking up to these airy and waving altitudes, and none that more carefully spare the tree which in youth sheltered them, and which waves, like the flag, long and fruity to their eyes. An American book of leading families would be larger than the London Directory, and make the fortune of even the Congressional Printer. True, the family herald would in nearly all these cases, like the chroniclers of ancient states, and the biographer of the Smiths, be obliged to substitute foggy conjecture for well-defined tracings. They would all find that their researches would, if carried back far enough, converge to the same focal point; and if produced at equal distances in the future, diffuse themselves into a common social, monetary, and undistinguishing equality: for families and states are much like boys at the ends of a balanced board, now up, now down, at one time touching the ground, then curving upward through medium spaces to a culminating point, while some one at the other end is noiselessly passing through a reversed career. And so John Smith balances and pendulates on the same board with a Van Rensselaer, John Brown with a Tozewell, Mr. Snooks with a Winthrop, and John Doe with a Hampton.