Estrangement

“ The common people, who went up into the interior to trade, fell in with their customs with a degree of plasticity and an air of gaiety and full assent, which no other foreigners have, at least to the same extent, shown. ”

“ What constitutes a given number of people a nation, besides their history, their political organization, and the geographical position of their territory? What makes every member belonging to a nation, whether he lives within its territory or has emigrated therefrom, a different being from every member of any other nation? What makes each member of a nation resemble every other member thereof, not only in regard to vocal expression but also in regard to general cast of features, build of body, movements, gesticulations, etc., and in what may be summed up as national traits of character? ”

“ I am told that several new books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will soon be laid before the public as foreign productions. ”

“ Suppose, then, the North were to speak to them as follows: Friends, we love and esteem you as citizens of a common country. As citizens, you enjoy every right that we enjoy, and whatever legitimate ambition you entertain, there is an open field for it, in this our common Republic. ”

“ We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from centre to circumference—foreign inside and outside and all around—nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness—nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. ”

“ The natural peculiarities of any region give rise to customs and practices of a corresponding peculiarity, so that where the same circumstances reappear, we find the same means of controlling them invented by different nations. ”

“ To this keen observer and lover of human nature, the many years of contact with this vivid, arduous East Side life—reinforced and interpreted by constant reading and thinking—brought an ever-increasing sense of social interrelation and interdependence. ”

“ The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things - that a nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner or by some observer from within. ”

“ In proof of this great and striking truth, no other argument requires to be offered, than an immediate reference to the experience of all ages and places: the various nations of the earth, the provinces of each nation, the towns, and even the villages of the same province, differ from each other in their accommodations; and are in every respect more flourishing, the greater their activity in establishing new channels of useful employ, calculated to procure the necessaries and comforts of life. ”

“ But there are, both in Nature and Reason, certain Provinces assign’d to each; and a Man’s attempting to overturn them, would be as absurd and preposterous, as a Merchant’s sending his Wife to transact Business upon Change, while he stay’d at home to preside over the Nursery. ”

“ To speak ingenuously, the difference I find between us and others, in the air, or manner that distinguishes Nations, is, that ours is industriously affected, and that of other Nations impress’d by nature, as it were in an indelible Character. ”

“ There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another; and then I suppose it may be said of you that you have become a cosmopolite. You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking for points of difference and of resemblance, for present and absent advantages, for the virtues that go with certain defects, and the defects that go with certain virtues. ”

“ Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love and chivalry. ”

“ The stage over which affairs, political, industrial and cultural, run their course is no longer Continental or British, but cosmopolitan, comprising all civilized communities and all civilized interests. ”

“ Then there is the consideration of the effect that one race or community inevitably has on another with which it comes in contact—either through conquest or through the establishment of commercial relations. ”

“ How are we to expect workmen to make their way through constitutional antiquities, through the labyrinthine shifts of party intrigue at home, and through the entanglements of intricate diplomacy abroad—'shallow village tales,' as Emerson calls them? ”

“ The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. ”

“ All the marked events of our day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced back to their origin in a private brain. All the feats which make our civility were the thoughts of a few good heads. ”

“ These points established, let us suppose a community of one thousand families, enclosed in a territory of a given circumference, and deprived of foreign intercourse. Let this community represent the human race, which, scattered over the face of the earth, is really isolated. ”

“ It gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods, to look upon and think about. They catch110 glimpses of the international connections of their trades, of the universal application of law, of the endless variety of life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with men like themselves, and yet full of strange customs, puzzled by dim omens, stained by crime, ringing with voices familiar and unfamiliar. ”

“ Now, mark, in the estimation of civilization it requires a settlement, territory and subjects for this territory; and then it requires certain ingredients within this community, to constitute civilization. ”

“ Some slight diversity exists, in different sections of the State, in manners, customs, and feelings, amongst the people, in accordance with the States or countries from which they or their fathers emigrated. ”

“ We certainly were living in a new sphere of life, in a strange land among strange people, with customs and habits that brought to mind the age of the patriarchs. There was much to see where some thirty nationalities lived and did business as if in their own homes—much to wonder at, much to deplore, much to praise and admire. ”

“ Let us in preference study one of the most eminently progressive of all the communities that have existed. Let us take an example quite different from any that can be drawn from Oriental life, but almost equally contrasted with any that can be found among ourselves; and let us, with the aid of it, examine the respective effects of leisure and of hurry upon the culture of the community. ”

“ I have given so much of this speech, because I think that it affords a good specimen of the tendency and impulse of speeches in this country, and especially in the Western country, where society evidently feels itself to belong in a high degree to the citizenship of the world; to be universal, because it is composed of people of all nations flowing in hither by emigration ”

“ A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial pride in their customs, manners, and language. ”

“ That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. ”

“ They attract sojourners from widely separated localities and promote interchange of views, of valuable knowledge, of ideas, of sympathies, that form an interchange of the utmost significance in its influence and determining effect upon the general international life. ”

“ Notwithstanding the general character of identity and homogenity that so strongly marks the picture of American society, exceptions are to be met with, in particular districts, that are not only distinct and incontrovertible, but which are so peculiar as to be worthy of more than a passing remark in our delineations of national customs. ”

“ One is to pursue the story in an inclusive form, paying attention to the divisions as well as the interdependence involved, possibly varying over time, between the manifestations of civilization in different parts of the world. ”

“ The question may now fairly be asked, What is the case in those parts of the world where people who are confessedly of different races and languages inhabit a continuous territory and live under the same government? ”

“ The foundations of the section were laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements were particularly free and eager to contribute to a new society and to receive an impress from the country which offered them a liberty denied abroad. ”

“ Similar examples may be derived from the History of Persia by Sir John Malcolm. But our limits do not permit us further to pursue a parallel which serves strikingly to show how the same state of society and civilisation produces similar manners, laws, and customs, even at the most remote period of time, and in the most distant quarters of the world. ”

“ And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which, though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and perhaps here, what the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing, the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen loses. ”

“ In an English or American book we should introduce the French word at once, which would induce the reader to inquire into the differences that exist between the minor territorial divisions, of his own country, and those of the country of which he is reading. ”

“ Here below, in these circumcentral regions, we place the sovereign good, not in taking and receiving, but in bestowing and giving; so that we esteem ourselves happy, not if we take and receive much of others, as perhaps the sects of teachers do in your world, but rather if we impart and give much. ”

“ Here, too, deputations from all the different provinces of creation, may occasionally assemble, and the inhabitants of different worlds mingle with each other, and learn the grand outlines of those physical operations and moral transactions, which have taken place in their respective spheres. ”

“ Using the word ‘tradition’ in the wide sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may be said to include the recognised social organisation of the whole people into classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind, whose relations to one another and whose place in the national system are determined by law, custom and conventions of various kinds. ”

“ As time passed on, these civilizations were transferred from one people to another; some of those who had represented the highest type of culture sinking back into obscurity, while others took their places. During the dawn of history we see civilization cling to certain districts, in which it is taken up, now by one people, now by another. ”

“ Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems, all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. ”

“ When we remember that a language not infrequently stands for several groups with related cultures, we can guess the immense number of human societies that have perished in the past in this intergroup competition. ”

“ This confusion, now seeming strange to us, we shall understand better on remembering that, even in early stages of civilized nations, the family groups which formed the units of the national group were in large measure independent communities, standing to one another on terms much like those on which the nation stood to other nations ”

“ For example, if Nations abstained from stealing, what need were there of fighting,—with its butcherings and burnings, decidedly the most expensive thing in this world? How much more two Nations, which, as I said, are but one Nation; knit in a thousand ways by Nature and Practical Intercourse ”

“ In her cities dwell as laborers men and women from every known country and representative of every race—a modern Babel of tongues with a greater variety, were it possible, than those upon whom fell confusion of speech in the ages gone. ”

“ In order to bring the members of society together in the first instance, the custom of the country was established that residents shall pay the first visit to strangers; and among strangers, first comers to later comers, foreign and domestic, the character of stranger ceasing after the first visit. ”