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powers. Judging by the criterion which Mr. White, after Mr. Jefferson has endeavoured to establish, might not the Abbe Raynal, and other European writers who denounce the American climate as unfa-vorable to the growth of animal bodies, and the energies of the human intellect, justify their conclu-sion, by the example of the Anglo-Americans? Among these decendents of the ingenious Europe-ans, since their settlement in America, have ap-peared fewer exquisite productions in the arts, fewer works of taste, erudition, or genius, than have adorned the kingdoms of Europe, in the same pe-riod. But is this to be imputed to the climate? and not rather to the peculiar labors, and occupations required in a new world, to draw it forth from its forests, and its marshes, which have diverted the efforts of the people to other objects of more immediate necessity? But besides this primary cause of deficiency in monuments of art, and works of taste, we may reckon the sparseness of our popula-tion which prevents that constant collision, and com-parison of sentiment, which contributes to strike out the fire of genius, and to correct its eccentricities and errors; the want of men of leisure, and of wealth either to cultivate the arts, or to encourage

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and reward them. But because we have produced no such poets as Pope, or Milton; no such groupes of wits as adorned London or Paris in the age of Anne, and of Louis the fourteenth, has a philoso-pher of Europe, in the pride of her present im-provements in every department of literature, a right to say, because one century has not yet produc-ed the fruits of ten, that the American like what was fabled of the Beotian, air, has hebetated the genius of this last and largest quarter of the globe? Whence arose the difference between the Athenian, and the Beotian, or Spartan wit, but from their different states of society? And the Anglo, or Gallo-American only affords another example of this powerful influence in diversifying, in maturing, or retarding the operations of the human mind. The period has not yet arrived for displaying the full powers of the American genius. But whoever will regard with a truly philosophic eye the works which it has accomplished, the almost new creation which it has produced, within the last century, over the face of an immense continent, will be disposed ra-ther to respect its energy and enterprize than to dis-parage it by an unfair comparison with the results of the wealth and population of Europe, and the ac-
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