Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/83

72 incredulity upon their countenances. I felt the full force of the lamentation of the poet,—


 * 'Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land,
 * All fear, none aid you, and few understand.'


 * "As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building­-yard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle groups of strangers gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, or sneer, or ridicule.  The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repeti­tion of the Fulton Folly.  Never did a single encour­aging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish cross my path."

Possibly Fulton and Fitch, like other inventors, may have exaggerated the public apathy and con­tempt; but whatever was the precise force of the innovating spirit, conservatism possessed the world by right. Experience forced on men's minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be. At the close of the eighteenth century nothing had occurred which warranted the belief that even the material difficulties of America could be removed. Radicals as extreme as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin were contented with avowing no higher aim than that America should reproduce the simpler forms of European republican society without European vices; and even this their opponents thought vision­ary. The United States had thus far made a single