In his influential Report on Manufactures, for example, which became the blueprint for the American System of the 19th century, Alexander Hamilton made the case for the encouragement of industry and commerce through governmental subsidies and protective tar- iffs.24 The growth of manufacturing would expand the wealth of the nation, Hamilton argued, both by increasing workforce participation among. [...] In short, Hamilton and his Federalist supporters saw the growth of industry and commerce—and, by extension, the growth of cities—as “necessary to the perfection of the body politic.”26 Jefferson’s Yeomanry Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, countered that the perfection of virtue in the body politic required that America take care to maintain her robust countryside rather than rush to convert it. [...] At the time, great numbers of Europeans were crossing the Atlantic to see America’s extraordinary heritage, he noted at the laying of the cornerstone of the gateway to Yellowstone, adding that “[t]he geysers, the extraordinary hot springs, the lakes, the mountains, the canyons, and cataracts unite to make this region something not wholly to be paralleled elsewhere on the globe.”80 In safeguarding. [...] Roosevelt conveyed the closeness to the nation’s past that the parks make available when at Yellowstone he noted that “[h]ere all the wild creatures of the old days are being preserved,” enabling Americans “to insure to themselves and to their children and to their children’s children much of the old-time pleasure of the hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter in the wilderness.”87 In showc. [...] Describing the experience of approaching the edge of Natural Bridge, Jefferson writes, “You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it.” He depicts a similar experience of viewing the Blue Ridge Mountains, which leave signs of the “most powerful agents of nature.” Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, pp.
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- United States of America
