This benevolently instructive work was the precursor of a
host of others on the same topics, and others of a kindred character.
America has been the standard subject for the trial essays of European
tyros in philosophy, political economy, and book-making in general.
Society in America has been presented, it would seem, in all its
aspects--religious, educational, industrial, political, commercial, and
fashionable. Our schools and our prisons, our churches and our theatres,
have been in turn the subject of investigation, of unqualified censure,
and of scarcely less unqualified laudation.
The subject thus dissected, put together, and dissected again, has
not been able to restrain some wincing and an occasional outcry,
when the scalpel has been held by a more than usually unskilful
hand--demonstrations of sensibility which have occasioned apparently as
much disapprobation as surprise in the anatomists. We flatter ourselves
that there is peculiar fitness in the metaphor just used, for the outer
form only of American life has been touched by these various writers.
Its spirit, that which gives to it its peculiar organization, has evaded
them as completely as the soul of man evades the keenest investigations
of the dissecting room.
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