CHAPTER V - UTTERANCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
Summary
“A country which has no national literature, or a literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues, population, manufactures, political connexions, may be recorded in statistical books: but the character of the people has no symbol and no voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only by mere sight and outward observation of their manners and procedure. Now, if both sight and speech, if both travellers and native literature, are found but ineffectual in this respect, how incalculably more so the former alone!”
Edinburgh Review.—Vol. xlvi. p. 309.There is but one method by which most nations can express the general mind: by their literature. Popular books are the ideas of the people put into language by an individual. To a self-governing people there are two methods open: legislation is the expression of the popular mind, as well as literature.
If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order; so much less violence to the first principles of morals is exhibited there than in any other social arrangements that the world has yet seen.
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- Society in America , pp. 205 - 223Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1837