It enjoyed the vast advantage over
Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction,
while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several
contradictory movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia
should be polarized or oriented towards the same point, America
might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed to
slip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible,
and needed most to know where the leaders could be found.
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the
last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies --
coal, iron, steam -- a distinct superiority in power over the old
industrial elements -- agriculture, handwork, and learning; but
the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties
resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain,
to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own
trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage;
a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His
world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow --
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs -- but
had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than
he -- American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans
and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil
war.
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