It is one of the signs of our advancing American civilization, that the
arts which preserve and restore the personal advantages necessary or
favorable to cultivated social life should have reached such perfection
among us. American dentists have achieved a reputation which has sent
them into the palaces of Europe to open the mouths of sovereigns and
princes as freely as the jockeys look into those of horses and colts.
Bad teeth, too common among us, help to breed good dentists, no doubt;
but besides this there is an absolute demand for a certain comeliness of
person throughout all the decent classes of our society. It is the same
standard of propriety in appearances which lays us open to the reproach
of caring too much for dress. If the national ear for music is not so
acute as that of some other peoples, the national eye for the harmonies
of form and color is better than we often find in older communities. We
have a right to claim that our sculptors and painters prove so much as
this for us. American taste was offended, outraged, by the odious "peg"
which the Old-World soldier or beggar was proud to show. We owe the
well-shaped, intelligent, docile limb, the half-reasoning willow of Mr.
Palmer, to the same sense of beauty and fitness which moulded the soft
outlines of the Indian Girl and the White Captive in the studio of his
namesake at Albany.

As we wean ourselves from the Old World, and become more and more
nationalized in our great struggle for existence as a free people, we
shall carry this aptness for the production of beautiful forms more and
more into common life, which demands first what is necessary and then
what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the
weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day
will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks
to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in
the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our