"Ralph W. Emerson - The Young American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

_A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association,
Boston, February 7, 1844_

GENTLEMEN:
It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual cne
country, and their duties from another. This false state of things
is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert
itself to the senses and to the imagination of her children, and
Europe is receding in the same degree. This their reaction on
education gives a new importance to the internal improvements and to
the politics of the country. Who has not been stimulated to
reflection by the facilities now in progress of construction for
travel and the transportation of goods in the United States?

This rage for road building is beneficent for America, where
vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and
trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to
hold the Union staunch, whose days seemed already numbered by the
mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges, and
officers across such tedious distances of land and water. Not only
is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the
steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the
thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind
them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward, and there
is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be
preserved.

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements
in creating an American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of
the railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American
people with the boundless resources of their own soil. If this
invention has reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing
people so much nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity to
_time_, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land,
the choice of water privileges, the working of mines, and other
natural advantages. Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power
to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.

The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it has
great value as a sort of yard-stick, and surveyor's line. The
bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on
territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;

"Our garden is the immeasurable earth,
The heaven's blue pillars are Medea's house."

The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this immense
tract, requires an education and a sentiment commensurate thereto. A