71. No prudent person dared to act on the assumption that, when the continent was settled, one government could include the whole; and when the vast expense broke up, as seemed inevitable, into a collection of separate nations, only discord, antagonism, and wars could be expected. 72. If they were right in thinking that the next necessity in human progress was to lift the average person upon an intellectual and social level with the most favored, they stood at least three generations nearer than Europe to that goal. 73. Somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poets song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every man owes it. 74. The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience. 75. Perhaps he believed that he could not criticize American foreign policy without endangering the support for civil rights that he had won from the federal government. 71、没有一个谨慎的人能按如下的假设行事:当陆地确定以后,一个政府并不能包括全部;当这种巨大的开销终于分裂为几个民族时,这看起来是不可避免的,人们就只能等待着争论,敌对和战争了。 |