and expressed great admiration of the general arrangements, and character of this famous schooner."

When the tidings reached our country, that the "America had beaten the world," the electric telegraph everywhere burned with welcome news. "The cry was caught up by millions, and congratulations of joy went reverberating from the sterile hills of New England until they were answered back from the orange groves of the distant Mississippi."

The magnanimity with which the English people cheered the America, on witnessing her triumph over their whole fleet of choicest yachts we fear would not have been paralleled under similar circumstances by our country. The Liverpool Journal from which we now quote, furnished a specimen of the comments which this event drew from the English press.

men.

"When Charlemagne saw the sail of the Northmen in the Mediterranean he covered his face with his hands and wept, in a prescience of the future. When Queen Victoria, yesterday week, witnessed the triumph of an American sail in a channel that washes her marine residence on the Isle of Wight, she did what Charlemagne ought to have done-she took note of the excellence which had achieved a victory, tacitly telling her subjects to profit by rivalry and keep their proud place in the advance of nations. The United States of America, now occupy that place on the globe which presents advantages unknown to all ancient and contemporary nations. She reposes between two oceans, one washing Europe, the other Asia. Nothing was wanting to the local enthronement of civilization but aptitude in the inhabitants; and the history of the past week, gives ample testimony to its abundant existence. In practical science we admitted no rivalry for more than a century; in trade we despised competition; and we claimed indisputably the sovereignty of the seas. For some time, however, the Yankees have been quietly encroaching on our maritime privilege by the rigid application of the great principles of commerce and science. They have, compared with ourselves, been equally enterprising-they have been more skillful; and while we pay willing homage to genius in whomsoever manifested, it is a mortification that in our waters, an American yacht won the prize from the yachts of all nations, and that an American-built steamer has made the quickest passage across the Atlantic. The Yankees are no longer to be ridiculed, much less despised. The new world is bursting into greatness-walking past the old world, as the America did the yachts at Cowes, hand over hand.' She dipped her star-spangled banner to the royalty of Great Britain, for superiority is ever courteous; and this graceful act indicates the direction in which our inevitable competition should proceed, America, in her own phrase, is going ahead,' and will assuredly pass us unless we accelerate our speed; and if our competitors once pass us, we are lost."

The results of the exhibition and the yacht race were so astonishing that it led to much philosophizing, by the English press, upon America and the Americans. The British Quarterly Review came out in an article upon this subject, from which we take a few paragraphs, which are worthy of record for their general truthfulness and insight into the workings of our institutions. "First of all then, the Americans are a nation; they display and are pervaded by a most intense spirit of nationality. No small nation of the Old World-not the Swiss, not the Scotch before the Union, not the Danes, are

possessed and animated in so extreme a degree by the pure sentiment of nationality as this large and highly-factitious nation of North America. True, the Union is divisible into four groups of States, presenting very marked differences from each other, as regards interests, social condition, and even physiognomy. First, there is the New England group of States-the land of the genuine Yankees, the hard-headed, laborious, dogmatic, shrewd, free, and enterprising descendants of the old Puritans. Next, there is the middle group of States-the seat of the great commercial interests, and of the more comprehensive political tendencies, of the Union. Then there is the southern group of States-the seat of slavery, and of aristocratic leisure and luxury, and the population of which, though less industrious, enterprising, and even intellectual than the New Englanders, are yet distinguished as having supplied the greatest number of statesmen to the Union. Lastly, there is the western group of States-the land of independent small farmers, the paradise of the agricultural immigrant, and the home of absolute democratic equality. But though these four groups of States have their distinguishing characteristics, and even their points of antagonism, in some cases exaggerated (as in the slavery controversy between the South and the North), into threats of political disruption; yet, on the whole, the inhabitants of all the four have no deeper feeling than that which displays itself in the boast that they are Americans. The nationality of the Americans is, as we all know, proverbially offensive. There never was a nation on the earth so vain of its own merits, and so contemptuous of the merits of others. 'Are we not a great nation, sir?' is their salutation to every foreign traveler in the States; and the common phrases of bombast put into the mouths of Americans in works of fiction, 'We are an almighty fine people;' 'We can put the Atlantic in one pocket, and the Pacific in another, and reduce the universe to nowhere and a spot of grease,' are hardly exaggerations of the actual slang with which the Americans regale their own sense of their national importance. Disagreeable in individuals, this national braggardism is formidable and respectable when viewed as characteristic of a people in the aggregate; and its possession by a people composed ethnographically of such heterogeneous elements is an illustration of Kossuth's remark, that the nation of every man is not a certain fragment of population marked out for him by considerations of race or even of language, but the seat of those social forms under whose influence his being has been developed. Even a black in America disclaims being an African, and says proudly, when he is asked to what country he belongs, 'I am an American.'

In the second place, the Americans are not only a nation, full to the brim of the consciousness of nationality; they are also entitled, according to any test or measure that can be applied to them, to rank high in the cosmopolitical scale. Tried by the numerical measure of population they are already on a par with Great Britain, and will soon leave it behind. Even Russia, with its fifty millions, must regard America as a full-grown nation. Again, tried by the test of exports and imports-that is, of commercial necessity to the rest of the world—the United States hold a place with the first. Fur ther, if we make military and naval prowess the test of cosmopolitical importance, America will still stand second to none. She has already, in the past, given sufficient proof of her capacities for fighting, both by sea and

land; and, if it be not yet admitted that the Americans are superior to the English at sea, it is at least certain that the despotic powers of the Old World would be more chary of insulting the star-spangled banner, than of insulting the flag of England. A Yankee captain, indeed, is notoriously the most terrible thing going; and chips of the American block generally, though they are recognized everywhere as the most braggart and irreverent of the sons of men, are recognized, also, as the most dangerous to be locked up or called in question for anything they say or do. Add to all this the consideration that in all departments of intellectual labor America is a leading nation. In art and literature, indeed, as well as in the higher walks of pure speculative science, America is yet behind England; though there is evidence, even now, that a spirit of more original effort in such things is at work among the Americans. But in the application of science to the social uses, in industrial invention, and generally in such exercises of the intellect as give a country practical eminence among the nations of the world they have already an acknowledged superiority. Among the machines for agricultural and other purposes sent to the Great Exhibition, those sent from America were the most useful; and Colt's pistol is but one example of an invention proceeding from America, and claiming instantly the attention of the whole world. Essentially the same thing, in reality, with this claim of America to high cosmopolitical estimation, in virtue of her Colt's pistols, her improved plows, reaping machines, models of ships, and the like, is her claim to the cosmopolitical estimation in virtue of the fact that she is already in possession of a great many conclusions on important social questions, which are, by their very nature, interesting to all the world alike, and that she is at present the richest known field of experimentation, with a view to the elucidation of other social questions.

The very thing that most of all gives a country cosmopolitical importance, is its ability to furnish out of its own experience answers to the questions that chance at the moment to be of greatest social interest to other countries, or to exhibit going on within its bosom processes and experiments, the issue of which is not yet clear perhaps even to itself, but which are curious, novel, and suggestive in their nature. Russia, in this respect, is almost a blank on the map. It has a claim to cosmopolitical respect, because it is a formidable power of conquest, and because it supplies us with hemp and the like; but who ever looks to Russia for solutions of problems common to all parts of the world, or for brilliant social sights and suggestions? America, on the other hand, is like a black-board on which something new is ever being chalked up, whether in the way of solution or of interrogation. For example, the entire political system of America is a practical solution of the great problem, everywhere important, of the reconciliation of local selfgovernment with federation. The question of national defenses without standing armies is also set in a new light to us by the militia system of America; while the question of the competence of a people to act on the aggressive, without standing armies, also receives light from the experience of America in volunteer enterprises. A hundred such examples might be given of points of great social interest, on which America may be said to have fully made up its mind, while the other nations are still only bungling in the dark. Lastly, what are such odd manifestations as the spirit rappings

the Mormonite outburst with its consequences, and all the other similar developments of American inquisitiveness or credulity, but chalkings, as it were, on the black-board of the world for the other nations to look at? If it be the case that humanity has not yet filled out its utmost constitutional limits, but that from age to age it is continually efflorescing into new man. ifestations, which seem at first anomalies, but are in reality normal and natural, where shall we look for the last efflorescence, the freshest sprouts, but in that country where human nature is newest and most advanced?

The third remark we would make about the American nation, regarded from our present point of view, is that no nation of the world seems to combine such an incessant and universal disposition to political activity, with such a beggarly show of internal political questions whereon to gratify that disposition. The American nation combines, more conspicuously than any other yet known, extreme sociability, that is, an extreme anxiety on the par individuals to concern themselves with the general politics of the state, with extreme individual freedom-that is, an extreme want of apparent necessity for any political activity at all. The ancient Athenians, in the days of their palmy democracy, were not characterized by greater political zeal and activity than the Americans. Every American is an active politician; every American, as a citizen, has an interest in public affairs, widening from the little circle of his own neighborhood to the great area of the federal government. Hence a development among the Americans of all kinds of political aptitude-aptitude in business arrangements for a political purpose, in public speaking on political questions, and the like—unrivaled among any other modern people. Stump-oratory among the Americans is as necessary a part of their civilization as was the eloquence of popular assemblies among the Athenians. And yet, with all this political energy diffused among individuals, the fields of disputed points over which political energy may range, might seem to be less important and extensive than in any of the older nations. In America, the great questions of civil liberty, of the sovereignty of the people, of a state church or no state church, of secular or ecclesiastical education-these, and all the other great questions of life or death, which are and for a long time will be the standing difficulties against which political energy in the older countries must dash and display itself, have been settled and extinguished. Even pauperism has hardly the rank of a great public question in a country where there is such indefinite room for an expansion of the population. With the exception of the single matter of slavery, there seems to be no question in the internal politics of America of very great magnitude, as measured by a general human standard. In short, that general Condition-of-America question,' on which the politicians and people of the United States divide themselves into parties, seems, to eyes looking on them from the outside, to be a mere aggregate of a great number of little questions of finance and the like, floating on the wave of passing circumstances. Yet, out of this most hopeless condition of things, as it might seem, for political activity, the Americans have contrived to raise a whirlwind and palaver, such as has hardly ever been seen even in a country agonized by questions of death, and life, and liberty. Nowhere does party. spirit run so high as in the United States, nowhere is political controversy carried on with greater virulence and more tremendous excitement."

ADVENTURES AND ACHIEVEMENTS

OF

AMERICANS

A BROA D.

A COLLECTION OF INTERESTING MISCELLANIES.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN," is a chivalrous expression, inasmuch as the word which indicates the gentler sex first drops from the lips. In accordance with the idea upon which this custom is founded, viz: prior attention to that important part of creation who alone furnish mothers, wives, and sisters-we begin this article with an account of a lady, one, too, of the "strong-minded" sort, who was fully capable of taking care of herself in all situations.

ADVENTURES OF THE ECCENTRIC AND PATRIOTIC FEMALE ARTIST, PATIENCE WRIGHT.

This extraordinary woman, whose name belongs to the history of American Art, and whose patriotism should make her known to the American people, was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, in the year 1725, and, like West, among a sect who eschewed images or pictures, for her parents were also Quakers. Her maiden name was Lovell, and at twenty-three years of age she married Joseph Wright, who died in 1769.

Dunlap, in his "History of the Arts of Design," gives this account of her: "She made her earliest attempts at molding before she had any works of art. From childhood, the dough intended for the oven, or the clay found near the house, assumed in her hands somewhat the semblance of a man, and, soon the likenesses of the individuals with whom she associated. Before the year 1772, she had made herself famous for likenesses in wax, in the cities of her native country, and when a widow with three children, was enabled to seek more extensive fame, and more splendid fortune in the metropolis of Great Britain. There is ample testimony in the English periodicals of the time, that her work was considered of an extraordinary kind and her talent for observation and conversation-for gaining knowledge and eliciting information, and for communicating her stores, whether original or acquired, gained her the attention and friendship of many distinguished men of the day. As she retained an ardent love for her country, and entered into the feelings of her injured countrymen during the war of the revolution, she used the information she obtained by giving warning of the intentions of their enemies, and especially corresponding with Benjamin Franklin, when he resided in Paris, having become intimate with