Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/67

Rh as well as enjoyed,' are involved. In building up the fabric of our commercial prosperity, let us not filch the corner-stone. Let it not be said of us, in future ages, that we ingloriously availed ourselves of a stock of scientific knowledge, to which we had not contributed our quota—that we shunned as a people to put our shoulder to the wheel—that we reaped where we had never sown. It is not to be controverted that such has been hitherto the case. We have followed in the rear of discovery, when a sense of our moral and political responsibility should have impelled us in its van."

But his strictures on America and Americans were equally bold and outspoken. When James Fenimore Cooper was being attacked with a malignity and scurrility without parallel in our history merely because he had made some tactless but essentially sound comments on American democracy, Poe, almost alone among American critics, hurried to the aid of the elder novelist. "We are a bull-headed and prejudiced people, and it were well if we had a few more of the stamp of Mr. Cooper who would feel themselves at liberty to tell us so to our teeth." The American fondness for glitter, glare, and show found in Poe its most consistent contemporary satirist:

"We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and