The United States offer in their bosom, under the protection of liberty, an image and a memory of the greater part of the famous spots of antiquity and of modern Europe: the Emperor Hadrian caused copies of the monuments of his empire to be placed in his garden in the Roman Campagna.
American progress.
Thirty-three high-roads run out of Washington, as formerly the Roman roads started from the Capitol; spreading asunder, they end at the circumference of the United States and trace a circulation of 25,747 miles. Posting-stations are established on a large number of these roads. One now takes the coach for the Ohio or Niagara as in my time one took a guide or an Indian interpreter. The means of transport are two-fold: lakes and rivers abound, and are connected by canals; you can travel alongside of the high-roads in rowing or sailing-boats, barges or steamers. Fuel is inexhaustible, since immense forests cover coal-mines level with the surface.
The population of the United States has increased in every decade from 1790 to 1820 at the rate of 35 per cent. It is calculated that in 1830 the population will amount to 12,875,000 souls. Continuing to double every twenty-five years, it should amount in 1855 to 25,750,000 souls, and twenty-five years later, in 1880, it should exceed fifty millions[522].
This human sap causes the wilderness to thrive on every side. The Canadian lakes, on which lately no sail was to be seen, now resemble docks in which frigates, corvettes, cutters and barks pass Indian pirogues and canoes, in the same way in which the big ships and galleys mix with the pinks, sloops and caiques in the waters of Constantinople. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio no longer pursue a solitary course: three-masters ascend their currents; over two hundred steam-boats enliven their banks. This immense inland navigation, which alone would ensure the prosperity of the United States, does not lessen their distant expeditions. Their vessels sail all the seas, engage in all forms of enterprise, carry the Stars and Stripes from the horizon of the setting sun to the shores where the sun rises, shores that have never known aught but slavery.
To complete this surprising scene, one must picture to one's self cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, lighted at night, filled with horses and carriages, adorned with coffee-houses, museums, libraries, ball-rooms, theatres, displaying all the enjoyments of luxury.
At the same time, the United States must not be searched for that which distinguishes man above the other beings of creation, for that which constitutes his certificate of immortality and the ornament of his days: literature is unknown in the new republic, although called for by a multitude of institutions. The American has replaced intellectual by positive operations. Do not impute to him as an inferiority his mediocrity in the arts, for it is not in that direction that he has turned his attention. Cast through various causes upon a desert soil, he made agriculture and commerce the first objects of his cares: before thinking, one must live; before planting trees, one must fell them, in order to till the ground.
The primitive colonists, it is true, their minds steeped in religious controversy, carried the passion for disputation into the very heart of the forests; but it was necessary for them first to shoulder their axes and march to the conquest of the desert: their sole pulpit, in the intervals between their labours, was the elm they were engaged in squaring. The Americans have not passed through the ages of other nations: they left their childhood and their youth in Europe; the artless words of the cradle were unknown to them; they enjoyed the delights of home only through the medium of their regrets for a native land which they had never seen, and of which they mourned the eternal absence and the charm they had heard of from others.
The new continent has no classical literature, nor romantic literature, nor Indian literature: for the classical, the Americans have no models; for the romantic, no middle-ages; I for the Indian, the Americans despise the savages and loathe the sight of the woods as of a prison to which they were once condemned.
And thus it comes that literature as a thing apart, literature properly so-called, does not exist in America; what one finds is applied literature, answering to the different needs of society: the literature of workmen, merchants, sailors, farmers. Americans succeed in mechanics and science, because science has its material side. Franklin[523] and Fulton[524] took possession of lightning and steam for the benefit of mankind. It fell to America to endow the world with the discovery, thanks to which no continent can henceforward escape the mariner's search.