But there was, at all events, a shadow of excuse, and
a slight basis of reason for a subserviency so grotesque. Even now,
perhaps, it would not be far wrong to assert that such basis of reason
may still exist. Let us grant that in many of the abstract sciences-
that even in Theology, in Medicine, in Law, in Oratory, in the
Mechanical Arts, we have no competitors whatever, still nothing but
the most egregious national vanity would assign us a place, in the
matter of Polite Literature, upon a level with the elder and riper
climes of Europe, the earliest steps of whose children are among the
groves of magnificently endowed Academies, and whose innumerable men
of leisure, and of consequent learning, drink daily from those
august fountains of inspiration which burst around them everywhere
from out the tombs of their immortal dead, and from out their hoary
and trophied monuments of chivalry and song. In paying then, as a
nation, a respectful and not undue deference to a supremacy rarely
questioned but by prejudice or ignorance, we should, of course, be
doing nothing more than acting in a rational manner. The excess of our
subserviency was blamable- but, as we have before said, this very
excess might have found a shadow of excuse in the strict justice, if
properly regulated, of the principle from which it issued.
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