Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen
upon a new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at
pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This state
of things is without a parallel in the history of the world. In America,
then, every one finds facilities, unknown elsewhere, for making or
increasing his fortune. The spirit of gain is always on the stretch, and
the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imagination
and the labors of the intellect, is there swayed by no impulse but the
pursuit of wealth. Not only are manufacturing and commercial classes to
be found in the United States, as they are in all other countries; but
what never occurred elsewhere, the whole community is simultaneously
engaged in productive industry and commerce. I am convinced that, if
the Americans had been alone in the world, with the freedom and the
knowledge acquired by their forefathers, and the passions which are
their own, they would not have been slow to discover that progress
cannot long be made in the application of the sciences without
cultivating the theory of them; that all the arts are perfected by one
another: and, however absorbed they might have been by the pursuit
of the principal object of their desires, they would speedily have
admitted, that it is necessary to turn aside from it occasionally, in
order the better to attain it in the end.

The taste for the pleasures of the mind is moreover so natural to the
heart of civilized man, that amongst the polite nations, which are least
disposed to give themselves up to these pursuits, a certain number of
citizens are always to be found who take part in them. This intellectual
craving, when once felt, would very soon have been satisfied. But at the
very time when the Americans were naturally inclined to require nothing
of science but its special applications to the useful arts and the means
of rendering life comfortable, learned and literary Europe was engaged