A national fault of ours is that of not getting the full use of things. European cities, for example, earn millions a year by selling their street dirt. American cities pay millions to get rid of it. In Europe it dresses sterile soil; in America it is dumped into channels to obstruct navigation. One can almost admire the humble Paris _chiffoniers_, as being a guild employed in redeeming to a hundred services what has been thrown away as useless--they rescue vast fortunes yearly. On the Pennsylvania oil lands twenty men put up a derrick, sink a test well, and fail. Sixteen out of the twenty reorganize, sink a new well within fifty rods of the other, build a new derrick, and never touch the old one, leaving it to rot. The expense of this kind of machinery is great; and yet out of the abandoned derricks in the oil regions you could almost build a timber track from Corry to New York. It is, I say, almost a national trait to accumulate what will be left to rust unused--although it is doubtless not American ladies alone that fill their wardrobes with garments never worn out. When a European friend of mine came to travel in this country, one of his first surprises was the hundreds of miles of expensive fences he saw enclosing very ordinary fields; next he noted the unused ground along the tracks of railroads. "That land would all be covered with vegetables in our country," he said. At his hotels he thought there was more wasted in labor, food, and superfluities than would have sufficed to reduce the cost of living by a third; indeed, I fancy he believed that despite our cry of "hard times" and "enforced economy," the sheer current _waste_ of America would pay the national debt in a year.
What freshness and fecundity in the veteran poet who signalizes his seventy-sixth birthday by publishing the "Légende des Siècles"! Hugoesque alike in its grand apostrophes and its gentle idyls, in its resounding declamation and its simple pathos, this new outcome of an old mint has every coin stamped with the image and superscription of its creator--Hugo's in thought, feeling, audacious style, easy versification, quaint novelty of metaphor; Hugo's in its cadence by turns joyous and mournful, now in sonorous, thrilling ballads of battle, anon in charming genre fireside pictures, here riotous in rhetoric, there pedantic in research, everywhere lofty in aspiration, though pushing oddity almost to madness.