This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[91]
that all this excellent leaven should pro. duce so little result, that these groups should remain so impotent and isolated, that their environment, in a country where our poverty is unknown, should be “a world in which not one man in a hundred thousand has either the manners or cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a week, or eats with a fork?”
It is not credible; to me, at any rate, it is not credible.
And I feel more sure than ever, that our Boston informant has told us of groups where he ought to have told us of individuals; and that many of his individuals, even, have “hopped over,” as he wittily says, to Europe.
Mr. Lowell himself describes his own nation as “the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people in the world.”
They strike foreigners in the same way. M. Renan says that the “United States have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, and will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence.”
Another acute French critic speaks of a “hard unintelligence” as characteristic of the people of the United States--la dure inintelligence
Boston. De Wolfe, Fiske &c Co. 361 and 365 Washington Street. 1888.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.