John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

[271] Scriptures? In piety, in knowledge of poetry, in reverence, the Goth was more advanced than his American descendant. I say, the Suabian peasant of to-day seems to me to be superior to the American farmer in many of those things that make life deep and cause society to endure.

To cut loose, to cast away, to destroy, seems to be our impulse. We do not want the past. This awful loss of all the terms of thought, this beggary of intellect, is shown in the unwillingness of the average man in America to go to the bottom of any subject, his mental inertia, his hatred of impersonal thought, his belief in labor-saving, his indifference to truth. The state of mind in which commercial classes spend their lives is not that of pure, self-sacrificing spiritual perception. The commercial mind seems, in its essence, to be the natural enemy of love, religion, and truth; and when, as at the present moment in America, we have commerce dominant in an era whose characteristic note is contempt for the past, we can hardly expect a picturesque, pleasing, or harmonious social life.

Much is lost sight of, much is forgotten among us; much is unknown that in any European country would be familiar. For