Now, as in 1793, there seems “equally a want of books and men; without which, after a few years of bloodshed and anarchy, those countries must again submit to a despotic form of government. No country can be governed without intellect; and if that is not to be found in the many, the few who possess it must become the ruler.
“By the SOUL Only, the Nations shall be great and free.”
This country has never long needed such a despotism. Germany, too, though hardly yet freed from a political despotism, has through a large portion of its area long thrown off the despotism of Rome, and embraced the more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the Reformation. In those provinces where this blessed change has taken place, Germany is starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality which England commenced three hundred years ago. The Germans and the English are preeminently deep-thinking nations; and in both of them is the Nose more decidedly and more generally of a Cogitative form than in any other Gothic nations.
The Cogitative may therefore, perhaps, be said to be one of the characteristic forms of the Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be expressed thus, (I + II)/III. Nevertheless, various degrees of education and various pursuits, with (in England) free institutions, have so diversified their features that they exhibit a much less uniform character than the features of most other nations.
The Anglo-Americans afford a further corroborative proof that the Cogitative Nose is dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative mind. They present a striking contrast to their puritan forefathers,—men who abandoned home, country and friends for the sake of religious and political opinions; men to whom conscience was dearer than life, and freedom more precious than worldly advantage; men of the strictest integrity, the most scrupulous honesty, and the sternest firmness, sullied only by an excess of over-wrought feeling—fanaticism. All these virtues, and this vice (itself a virtue gone mad) are wanting to the American character. That there are happy exceptions, it is true; but a nation which boasts _smartness_ as its most prominent virtue, must not complain if it is accused of want of principle. The circumstances of young America have contributed to render hers an unthinking people. The wild life to which so large a portion have been subjected, cut off from all neighbourhood, debarred from communication with cultivated minds, thrown entirely on the active business of the day for mental food, they have necessarily degenerated from the thinking men to whom they are indebted for their origin.