"The French army!" exclaimed Obed Chute, in indescribable accents.
"Yes. It is generally conceded that the French army takes the lead in military matters. I say so, although I am a British officer."
"Have you ever traveled in the States?" said Obed Chute, quietly.
"No. I have not yet had that pleasure."
"You have never yet seen our Western population. You don't know it, and you can't conceive it. Can you imagine the original English Puritan turned into a wild Indian, with all his original honor, and morality, and civilization, combining itself with the intense animalism, the capacity for endurance, and the reckless valor of the savage? Surround all this with all that tenderness, domesticity, and pluck which are the ineradicable characteristics of the Saxon race, and then you have the Western American man--the product of the Saxon, developed by long struggles with savages and by the animating influences of a boundless continent."
"I suppose by this you mean that the English race in America is superior to the original stock."
"That can hardly be doubted," said Obed Chute, quite seriously. "The mother country is small and limited in its resources. America is not a country. It is a continent, over which our race has spread itself. The race in the mother country has reached its ultimate possibility. In America it is only beginning its new career. To compare America with England is not fair. You should compare New York, New England, Virginia, with England, not America. Already we show differences in the development of the same race which only a continent could cause. Maine is as different from South Carolina as England from Spain. But you Europeans never seem able to get over a fashion that you have of regarding our boundless continent as a small country. Why, I myself have been asked by Europeans about the health of friends of theirs who lived in California, and whom I knew no more about than I did of the Chinese. The fact is, however, that we are continental, and nature is developing the continental American man to an astonishing extent.
"Now as to this Lombard war," continued Obed Chute, as Windham stood listening in silence, and with a quiet smile that relieved but slightly the deep melancholy of his face--"as to this Lombard war; why, Sir, if it were possible to collect an army of Western Americans and put them into that there territory"--waving his hand grandly toward the Apennines--"the way they would walk the Austrians off to their own country would be a caution. For the Western American man, as an individual, is physically and spiritually a gigantic being, and an army of such would be irresistible. Two weeks would wind up the Lombard war. Our Americans, Sir, are the most military people in the wide universe."
"As yet, though, they haven't done much to show their capacity," said Windham. "You don't call the Revolutionary war and that of 1812 any greater than ordinary wars, do you?"
"No, Sir; not at all," said Obed Chute. "We are well aware that in actual wars we have as yet done but little in comparison with our possibilities and capabilities. In the revolutionary war, Sir, we were crude and unformed--we were infants, Sir, and our efforts were infantile. The swaddling bands of the colonial system had all along restrained the free play of the national muscle; and throughout the war there was not time for full development. Still, Sir, from that point of view, as an infant nation, we did remarkable well--re-markable. In 1812 we did not have a fair chance. We had got out of infancy, it is true; but still not into our full manhood. Besides, the war was too short. Just as we began to get into condition--just as our fleets and armies were ready to _do_ something--the war came to an end. Even then, however, we did re-markable well--re-markable. But, after all, neither of these exhibited the American man in his boundless possibility before the world."