Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/74

 from which to watch the growth and the behavior of the political community composed of what might have been thought rather crude and heterogenous elements, comparatively uninfluenced by the guidance of the experienced native mind; to follow the processes by which the foreign-born man, the new-comer, develops himself into a conscious American, and to discover what kind of an American will result as a product of those processes. I intend to express my conclusions somewhat more elaborately in a chapter specially devoted to the subject.

On the whole, the things that I saw and heard made the West exceedingly attractive to me. This was something of the America that I had seen in my dreams; a new country, a new society almost entirely unhampered by any traditions of the past; a new people produced by the free intermingling of the vigorous elements of all nations, with not old England alone, but the world for its motherland; with almost limitless opportunities open to all, and with equal rights secured by free institutions of government. Life in the West, especially away from the larger towns, lacked, indeed, the finer enjoyments of civilization to a degree hard to bear to those who had been accustomed to them and who did not find a compensation in that which gave to Western life—and American life generally—its peculiar charm: a warm, living interest in the progressive evolution, constantly and rapidly going on, the joy of growth—that which I have attempted to call in German “die Werdelust.” Now and then we have heard persons of culture—exaggerated culture, perhaps—complain that this country has no romantic, ivy-clad ruins, no historic castles or cathedrals, and, in general, little that appeals to sentiment or to the cultivated esthetic sense. True, it has the defects common to all new countries, and it will be tedious and unattractive to those who cherish as the quintessence of life the things which a new