Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[78] Eruditorum, let us say—which had been regularly reprinted in Rome with a wider circulation than any metropolitan issue, then Rome would again have ceased to be Rome; and yet this is what is done in London every month by the American illustrated magazines. It is clear, then, that London is not the exclusive intellectual centre of the English-speaking world, nor is there the slightest evidence that it is becoming more and more such a centre. On the contrary, one hears in England a prolonged groan over an imagined influence the other way. ‘I have long felt,’ wrote Sir Frederick Elliot to Sir Henry Taylor from London (December 20, 1877), ‘that the most certain of political tendencies in England is what, for want of a better name, I will call the Yankeeizing tendency.’ But apart from these suggestions as to London, Mr. Lowell has urged and urged strongly the need of a national capital. He has expressed the wish for ‘a focus of intellectual, moral, and material activity,’ ‘a common head, as well as a common body.’ In this he errs only, as it seems to me, in applying too readily to our vaster conditions