feathers, and plucked the wool from the sheep instead of shearing it.
The relative position or grade, on the human scale, of any tribe or race of men — much like that of any one man among his fellows — is to be measured by the sum and range of their capacities, and the degree of their self-improvement by the use of means, resources, and appliances within their reach. And the capacities of men are also to be estimated by the extent to which they actually avail themselves of these means, appliances, and resources; finding in native impulse and energy, quickness of wit, restlessness of feeling, the spur of progress; casting about them for reliefs, helps, betterments of their condition. We classify nations by the direction in which they have trained and advanced one or another of the abilities and aptitudes of our manifold nature. In the Greeks, the direction of it was in artistic, poetic, and philosophic culture, the genius for which is expressed in their wonderful language; in the Romans, it was an organizing faculty, working in the range of law in all its departments; in Germany, research, scholarship, jurisprudence; in Italy, aesthetic, for poetry, painting, and music; in France, a mixture of use and ornament, — the packages in which certain cosmetics, etc., are done up being more ingenious than their contents; in the English, it is general utilitarianism, with strength, thoroughness, and skill; in the Irish, it is a cheerful willingness for hard, patient, laborious, disagreeable work, without mental restlessness. We know how we, especially, are indebted to the faithful toil of the Irish race; yet I cannot recall a single invention, or discovery in art or science, ever made by an Irishman. If one would have before him a full demonstration of the adroit and acute inventiveness and ingenuity of the Yankee race, let him spend a week or a month — there will be full employment for it — in the Patent Office at Washington, among reapers, thrashers, and winnowers, cotton mules, cooking
