Such a social organisation is the very best for a pioneer people. Without this devotion to business, without this constant direction of the energies of the mind to useful enterprises, without this indifference to pleasure, without those political and religious notions which imperiously repress all passions but those whose objects are business, production, and gain, can any one suppose that the Americans would ever have achieved their great industrial conquests? With any other less exclusive system, they would yet, perhaps, be meditating the passage over the Alleghanies. Instead of having that great domain of the West, immense in its extent and resources, already cleared and cultivated, furrowed with roads and dotted over with farms, they would probably be still confined to the sandy strip that borders the Atlantic. It must be allowed that this ardent and entire devotion to business gives the nation a strange aspect in the eyes of a European: And this explains the fact that the Americans have found so little favour with most foreigners who have visited their country. But, in return, they are sure of the gratitude of that innumerable posterity for whom they are preparing with such energy and sagacity an abode of plenty, a land of promise. This posterity, it is said, will change the habits of their fathers, will adopt new tastes, and even new institutions. So be it! It is of little consequence whether the Americans of the 20th or 21st century, shall retain the national character, customs, and laws of the Americans of the 19th. But the more interesting consideration is, whether the Americans of our day do not fulfil, as perfectly as human nature is capable of doing, the mission which Providence has entrusted to them, that of acting as a nation of pioneers and subduers of the forest; and if they do not deserve to be excused, like all nations and individuals, for having the defects inherent in their good qualities. The question thus stated will be easily answered by every one who sets any value on the interests and welfare of the future.
One of the points in which modern society differs most from the ancient, is, certainly, the facility of travelling. Formerly it was possible only for a patrician to travel; it was necessary to be rich even to travel like a philosopher. Merchants moved in caravans, paying tribute to the Bedoweens of the desert, to the Tartars of the steppes, to the chieftains perched, like eagles, in castles built in the mountain passes. Instead of the English stage-coach, or the post-chaise, rattling at high speed over the paved road, they had the old Asiatic litter or palanquin, still preserved in Spanish America, or the camel, the ship of the desert, or four bullocks yoked to the slow wagon, or for the common citizens or the iron warriors, the horse; and instead of those sumptuous steam-packets, genuine floating palaces, the small and frail bark, pursued by robbers on the rivers and by pirates by sea, the sight of which extorted from the Epicurean Horace the exclamation of terror,