It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of
time, the United States of America shall become to England what England
has become to Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, that the
mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see
the full maturity of her gigantic offspring. We have no right to assume
it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up,
unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history. But England,
forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest,
has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the
present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to
become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the
master-power of the planet.
The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her
dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted
in its recollections. _Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad
auras_,--if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may
be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose
ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the
end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the
horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report
it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of
Leo.
Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread
of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by
its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge
drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular
legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England
boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the
least, does not love us.
An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a
secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors
in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of
stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's
hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty
announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never
again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its
Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a
miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the
leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the
bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished
fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States"
could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A _Te Deum_ in
Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of
what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.
If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered
this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been
blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of: England in
alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its
very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom,
education, and the dignity of labor. If the silent masses of the British
people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no
saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts
might have led the proud haters of popular government.
Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which
has met with the usual success of compromises. The aristocracy, which
very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of
being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not
force herself into our quarrel. That portion of the middling classes
which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been
compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole
world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have
been so long the boast of British patriots. The people of the Union, who
expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the
slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended. The
Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join
them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions,
have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness. Western Europe failed
us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.
The recent action of the British Government, under the persuasive
influence of Mr. Seward's polite representation, that instant
hostilities would be sure to follow, if England did not keep her iron
pirates at home, has improved somewhat the tone of Northern feeling
towards her. The late neighborly office of the Canadian Government, in
warning us of the conspiracy to free our prisoners, has produced a very
favorable impression, so far as the effect of a single act is felt in
striking the balance of a long account.
We can, therefore, examine some of our relations with Great Britain in a
better temper now than we could do some months ago, when we never went
to sleep without thinking that before morning we might be shelled out of
our beds by a fleet of British iron-clad steamers. But though we have
been soothed, and in some measure conciliated, by the change referred
to, there is no such thing possible as returning to the _status quo ante
bellum_. We can never feel in all respects to England as we felt of old.
This is a fact which finds expression in so many forms that it is
natural to wish to see how deep it lies: whether it is an effect of
accidental misunderstanding and collision of interests, or whether it
is because the events of the last few years have served to bring to
light the organic, inherent, and irreconcilable antagonism of the two
countries.
We are all of us in the habit of using words so carelessly, that it will
help us to limit their vagueness as here employed. We speak of "England"
for Great Britain, for the simple reason that Ireland is but a reluctant
alien she drags after her, and Scotland only her most thriving province.
We are not surprised, for instance, when "Blackwood" echoes the abusive
language of the metropolitan journals, for it is only as a village-cur
joins the hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the
attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the
collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and
insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the
hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the
undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as
well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves into an
image having very much the look of representing the nation,--certainly
much more the look of it than the sum of all those manifestations which
indicate sympathy with the cause of the North.
The attitude of England, then, has been such, since the Rebellion began,
as to alienate much of the affection still remaining among us for the
mother-country. It has gone far towards finishing that process of
separation of the child from the parent which two centuries of exile and
two long wars had failed to complete. But, looking at the matter more
clearly, we shall find that our causes of complaint must be very
unequally distributed among the different classes of the British people.
The _Government_ has carefully measured out to us, in most cases
certainly, strict, technical justice. It could not well do otherwise,
for it knows the force of precedents. But we have an unpleasing sense
that our due, as an ally and a Christian nation, striving against an
openly proclaimed heathen conspiracy, has been paid us grudgingly,
tardily, sparingly, while our debt, as in the case of the Rebel
emissaries, has been extorted fiercely, swiftly, and to the last
farthing. We have recognized a change, it is true, ever since Earl
Russell gave the hint that our cause was more popular in England than
that of the South. We have gratefully accepted the friendly acts already
alluded to. Better late than not at all. But the past cannot be undone.
British "neutrality" has strengthened the arms that have been raised
against our national life, and winged the bloody messengers that have
desolated our households. Still, every act of justice which has even a
show of good-will in it is received only too graciously by a people
which has known what it is to be deserted by its friends in the hour of
need. Whatever be the motives of the altered course of the British
Government,--an awakened conscience, or a series of "Federal"
successes,--Mr. Sumner's arguments, or General Gillmore's long-range
practice,--a more careful study of the statistics of Slavery, or of the
lists of American iron-clad steamers,--we welcome it at once; we take
the offered hand, if not with warm pressure, at least with decent
courtesy. We only regret that forbearance and good offices, and that
moral influence which would have been almost as important as an
offensive and defensive alliance, had not come before the flower of our
youth was cut down in the battle-field, and mourning and misery had
entered half the families of the land.
The British _aristocracy_, with all its dependent followers, cannot help
being against us. The bearing which our success would have on its
interests is obvious enough, and we cannot wonder that the instinct of
self-preservation opens its eyes to the remote consequences which will
be likely to flow from the continued and prosperous existence of the
regenerated, self-governing Union. The privileged classes feel to our
labor- and money-saving political machinery just as the hand-weavers
felt to the inventor and introducers of the power-loom. The simple fact
is, that, if a great nation like ours can govern itself, they are not
needed, and Nobility has a nightmare of Jews going about the streets
with half a dozen coronets on their heads, one over another, like so
many old beavers. What can we expect of the law-spinning heir-loom
owners, but that they should wish to break this new-fangled machine, and
exterminate its contrivers? The right to defend its life is the claim of
everything that lives, and we must not lose our temper because the
representatives of an hereditary ruling class wish to preserve those
privileges which are their very existence, nor because they have
foresight enough to know, that, if the Western Continent remains the
seat of a vast, thriving, irresistible, united republic, the days of
their life, as an order, are numbered.
"The _people_," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters,
"everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an
oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British
people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political
and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been
long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We
have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been
reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison
instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this
particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a
reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal
to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants
of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to
sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was
respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most
painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the
opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should
have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people,
for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long
campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have
dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.
The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been
like that of harsh treatment upon children generally. It chills their
affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts
their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the
family-mansion. But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the
recollections of the past. It cannot deprive the "old home" of its
charm. If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its
roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grateful memories will
cluster about that one, though the hearts of the rest were hard as the
nether millstone.
The soil of England will always be dearer to us of English descent than
any except our own. The Englishman will always be more like one of
ourselves than any "foreigner" can be. We shall never cease to feel the
tenderest regard for those Englishmen who have stood by us like brothers
in the day of trial. They have hardly guessed in our old home how sacred
to us is the little island from which our fathers were driven into the
wilderness,--not saying, with the Separatists, "Farewell, Babylon!
farewell, Rome!" but "Farewell, _dear_ England!" At that fearful thought
of the invasion of her shores,--a thought which rises among the spectral
possibilities of the future,--we seem to feel a dull aching in the bones
of our forefathers that lie beneath her green turf, as old soldiers feel
pain in the limbs they have left long years ago on the battle-field.
But hard treatment often proves the most useful kind of discipline. One
good effect, so far as we are concerned, that will arise from the harsh
conduct of England, will be the promotion of our intellectual and moral
independence. We declared our political independence a good while ago,
but this was as a small dividend is declared on a great debt. We owed a
great deal more to posterity than to insure its freedom from political
shackles. The American republic was to be emancipated from every
Old-World prejudice that might stand in the way of its entire fulness of
development according to its own law, which is in many ways different
from any precedent furnished by the earlier forms of civilization. There
were numerous difficulties in the way. The American talked the language
of England, and found a literature ready-made to his hands. He brought
his religion with him, shaped under English influences, whether he
called himself Dissenter or not. He dispensed justice according to the
common law of England. His public assemblies were guided by
Parliamentary usage. His commerce and industry had been so long in
tutelage that both required long exercise before they could know their
own capacities.
The mother-country held her American colonies as bound to labor for her
profit, not their own, just as an artisan claims the whole time of his
apprentice. If we think the policy of England towards America in the
year 1863 has been purely selfish, looking solely to her own interest,
without any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us
look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663. If
her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to
have learned our lesson.
Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed
to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its
preamble stated, "of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence
upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto
it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and
seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and
commodities," etc. This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and
perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the
mother-country for most of the products of industry. But in an infant
community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it
required another century before an extension of the same system was
publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent. To
show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the
public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved,
short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the
details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the
disposition of the Colonists.
One hundred years ago, on the tenth of February, 1763, a treaty of peace
between England and France, as the leading powers, was signed at Paris.
This was no sooner arranged than the Ministry began that system of
Colonial taxation which the Massachusetts House of Representatives
denounced as tending to give the Crown and Ministers "an absolute and
uncontrollable power of raising money upon the people, which by the wise
Constitution of Great Britain is and can be only lodged with safety in
the legislature." Part and parcel of this system was that comprehensive
scheme of tyranny by means of which England attempted to secure the
perpetual industrial dependence of the American Colonies, the principle
of which we have already seen openly avowed in the Act of Parliament of
1663, a hundred years earlier.
It was her fixed policy, as is well known, to keep her skilled artisans
at home, and to discourage as far as possible all manufactures in the
Colonies. By different statutes, passed in successive reigns, persons
enticing artificers into foreign countries incur the penalty of five
hundred pounds and twelve months' imprisonment for the first offence,
and of one thousand pounds and two years' imprisonment for the second
offence. If the workmen did not return within six months after warning,
they were to be deemed aliens, forfeit all their lands and goods, and be
incapable of receiving any legacy or gift. A similar penalty was laid so
late as the reign of George III. upon any person contracting with or
endeavoring to persuade any artificer concerned in printing calicoes,
cottons, muslins, or linens, or preparing any tools for such
manufacture, to go out of the kingdom.
The same jealousy of the Colonies, lest they should by their success in
the different branches of industry interfere with the home monopoly,
shows itself in various other forms. There was, naturally enough, a
special sensitiveness to the practice of the art of printing. Sir Edmund
Andros, when he came out as Governor of the Northern Colonies, was
instructed "to allow of no printing-press"; and Lord Effingham, on his
appointment to the government of Virginia, was directed "to allow no
person to use a printing-press on any occasion whatever."
The Board of Trade and Plantations made a report, in 1731, to the
British Parliament concerning the "trades carried on, and manufactures
set up, in the Colonies," in which it is recommended that "some
expedient be fallen upon to direct the thoughts of the Colonists from
undertakings of this kind; so much the rather, because these
manufactures in process of time may be carried on in a greater degree,
unless an early stop be put to their progress."
In one of Franklin's papers, published in London in 1768, are enumerated
some instances of the way in which the Colonists were actually
interfered with by legislation.
"Iron is to be found everywhere in America, and beaver are the natural
produce of that country: hats and nails and steel are wanted there as
well as here. It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire
whether a subject of the king gets his living by making hats on this or
on that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to
obtain an act in their own favor restraining that manufacture in
America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to
England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the
charges of a double transportation. In the same manner have a few
nail-makers, and a still smaller body of steel-makers, (perhaps there
are not half a dozen of these in England,) prevailed totally to forbid,
by an Act of Parliament, the erecting of slitting-mills or
steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all
their nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these
artificers," etc.
"It is an idle argument in the Americans," said Governor Pownall, "when
they talk of setting up manufactures _for trade_; but it would be
equally injudicious in Government here to force any measure that may
render the manufacturing for _home consumption_ an object of prudence,
or even of pique, in the Americans."
The maternal Government pressed this matter a little too fast and too
far. The Colonists became _piqued_ at last, and resolved, in 1764, not
to purchase English stuffs for clothing, but to use articles of domestic
manufacture as far as possible. Boston, always a ringleader in these
mischiefs, diminished her consumption of British merchandise ten
thousand pounds and more in this one year. The Harvard-College youth
rivalled the neighboring town in their patriotic self-sacrifice, and the
whole graduating class of 1770, with the names of Hutchinson,
Saltonstall, and Winthrop at the head of the list, appeared at
Commencement in black cloth of home-manufacture. This act of defiance
only illustrates more forcibly the almost complete dependence of
Colonial industry at the time of its occurrence, the effect of a policy
which looked upon the Colonies with no reference to any other
consideration than the immediate profit to be derived from them.
In spite, however, of the hard measures employed by England to cripple
the development of the Colonies in every direction, except such as might
be profitable to herself, it was a very difficult matter to root out
their affection for the mother-country. Pownall, who was in this country
from 1753 to 1761, successively Governor of Massachusetts,
Lieutenant-Governor of New Jersey, and Governor of South Carolina, gives
us the most ample testimony on this point. His words are so strong that
none can fail to be impressed with the picture he draws of a people who
ten years later were in open revolt against the home authorities.
"The duty of a colony is affection for the mother-country: here I may
affirm, that, in whatever form and temper this affection can lie in the
human breast, in that form, by the deepest and most permanent
impression, it ever did lie in the breast of the American people. They
have no other idea of this country [England] than as their home; they
have no other word by which to express it, and, till of late, it has
constantly been expressed by the name of home. That powerful affection,
the love of our native country, which operates in every heart, operates
in this people towards England, which they consider as their native
country; nor is this a mere passive impression, a mere opinion in
speculation,--it has been wrought up in them to a vigilant and active
zeal for the service of this country."
And Franklin's testimony confirms that of the English Governor.
"The true loyalists," he says, "were the people of America against whom
the royalists of England acted. No people were ever known more truly
loyal, and universally so, to their sovereigns.... They were
affectionate to the people of England, zealous and forward to assist in
her wars, by voluntary contributions of men and money, even beyond their
proportion."
Such was the people whose love and obedience the greedy and grasping
policy of the British Government threw away, never to be regained. The
Revolution came at last, and the people reckoned up the long arrears of
oppression. "In the short space of two years," says a contemporary
writer, "nearly three millions of people passed over from the love and
duty of loyal subjects to the hatred and resentment of enemies."
We have seen that our cautious parent had taken good care not to let her
American children learn the use of her tools any farther or faster than
she thought good for them--and herself. They no sooner got their hands
free than they set them at work on various new contrivances. One of the
first was the nail-cutting machinery which has been in use ever since.
All our old houses--the old gambrel-roofed Cambridge mansions, for
instance--are built with wrought nails, no doubt every one of them
imported from England. Many persons do not know the fact that the
screw-auger is another native American invention, having been first
manufactured for sale at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1776, or a little
earlier. Eli Whitney contrived the cotton-gin in 1792, and some years
later the machinery for the manufacture of fire-arms, involving the
principle of absolute uniformity in the pattern of each part, so that
any injured or missing portion of a gun may be instantly supplied
without special fitting.
We claim to have done our full share in the way of industrial inventions
since we have become a nation. The four elements have all accepted the
American as their master. The great harvests of the earth are gathered
by his mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its
lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its
watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the
conflagration that reddens the firmament is subdued by the inundation
that flows upon it from an American steam-fire-engine. In the realm of
air, the Frenchman who sent a bubble of silk to the clouds must divide
his honors with the American who emptied the clouds themselves of their
electric fires. Water, the mightiest of all, which devours the earth
and quenches the fire, and rides over the air in vaporous exhalations,
has been the chosen field of ingenious labor for our people. The great
American invention of _ice_,--perhaps there is a certain approach to its
own coolness in calling it an invention, though Sancho, it may be
remembered, considered sleep in that light,--this remarkable invention
of ice, as a tropical commodity, could have sprung only from a
republican and revolutionary brain. The steamboat has been claimed for
various inventors, for one so far back as 1543; but somehow or other it
happened, as it has so often happened, that "the chasm from mere
attempts to positive achievement was first bridged by an American." Our
wave-splitting clippers have changed the whole model of sailing-vessels.
One of them, which was to have been taken in tow by the steam-vessels of
the Crimean squadron, spread her wings, and sailed proudly by them all.
Our iron water-beetles would send any of the old butterfly three-deckers
to the bottom, as quickly as one of these would sink a Roman trireme.
The Yankee whittling a shingle with his jack-knife is commonly accepted
as a caricature, but it is an unconscious symbolization of the plastic
instinct which rises step by step to the clothes-pin, the apple-parer,
the mowing-machine, the wooden truss-bridge, the clipper-ship, the
carved figure-head, the Cleopatra of the World's Exhibition.
One American invention, or discovery, has gone far towards paying back
all that the new continent owes to the old civilizations. The cradle of
artificial _anæsthesia_--man's independence of the tyranny of pain--must
be looked for at the side of the Cradle of Liberty. Never was a greater
surprise than the announcement of this miraculous revelation to the
world. One evening in October, 1846, a professional brother called upon
the writer of this paper. He shut the door carefully, and looked
nervously around him. Then he spoke, and told of the wondrons results of
the experiment which had just been made in the operating-room. "In one
fortnight's time," he said, "all Europe will be ablaze with this
discovery." He then produced and read a paper that he had just drawn up
for a learned society of which we were both members, the first paper
ever written on this subject. On that day not a surgeon in the world,
out of a little New-England circle, made any profession of knowing how
to render a patient quickly, completely, pleasantly, safely insensible
to pain for a limited period. In a few weeks every surgeon in the world
knew how to do it, and the atmosphere of the planet smelt strong of
sulphuric ether. The discovery started from the Massachusetts General
Hospital, just as definitely as the cholera started from Jessore, to
travel round the globe.
The advance of our civilization is still more strongly marked by the
number and excellence of musical instruments, especially pianos, which
are made in this country. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that
the piano keeps pace with the plough, as our population advances. More
striking evidence than even this is found in the fact that the highest
grade of the highest instruments used for scientific research is
produced by our artisans. One of the two largest telescope-lenses in the
world is that made by Mr. Clark, of Cambridge, whose reputation is not
confined to our own country. The microscopes of Mr. Spencer, which threw
those of the Continent into the shade at once, and challenged
competition with the work of the three great London opticians, were made
in a half-cleared district of Central New York, where, in our
pilgrimages to that Mecca of microscopists, Canastota, we found the
shrine we sought in the midst of the charred stumps of the primeval
forest. While Mr. Quekett was quoting Andrew Ross, the most famous of
the three opticians referred to, as calling "135° the largest angular
pencil that can be passed through a microscopic object-glass," Mr.
Spencer was actually making twelfths with an angle of more than 170°.
Those who remember the manner in which the record of his extraordinary
success was deliberately omitted from the second edition of a work which
records the minutest contrivance of any English amateur,--the first
edition having already mentioned the "young artist living in the
backwoods,"--will recognize in it something of the old style in which
the mother-country used to treat the Colonists.
It may be fairly claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the
American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements,
has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of
manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which
might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and
a maker of lawgivers, if not of laws. We are deficient principally in
patience of detail, and the skill which springs from minute subdivision
of labor and from hereditary training. All this will come
by-and-by,--all the sooner, if our ports are closed by foreign war. No
natural incapacity prevents us from making as good broadcloth, as fine
linen, as rich silks, as pure porcelain, as the Old World can send us.
If England wishes to hasten our complete industrial independence, she
has only to quarrel with us. We should miss many things at first which
we owe to her longer training, but they are mostly products of that kind
of industry which furnishes whatever the market calls for.
The intellectual development of the Colonists was narrowed and limited
by the conditions of their new life. There was no need of legislation to
discourage the growth of an American literature. At the period of the
Revolution two books had been produced which had a right to live, in
virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we
need not count in this category the records of events, such as
Winthrop's Journal, or Prince's Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous,
conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather's
"Magnalia." The two real American books were a "Treatise on the Will,"
and "Poor Richard's Almanack." Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin
were the only considerable names in American literature in all that
period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole
lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke
and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,--a period embracing five
generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen,
philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and
immortality. The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature
and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went
along. Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were
rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state: for religion and politics
always play into each other's hands, and the constitution is the child
of the catechism. Harvard College was dedicated to "Christ and the
Church," but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at
Commencement, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if
the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved,"--Samuel Adams speaking
in the affirmative.
Such was the condition of America at the period just preceding the
Revolutionary movement. Commercial and industrial dependence maintained
by Acts of Parliament, and only beginning to be openly rebelled against
under the irritation produced by oppressive enactments. Native
development in the fields of letters and science hardly advanced beyond
the embryonic stage; a literature consisting of a metaphysical treatise
and a popular almanac, with some cart-loads of occasional sermons, some
volumes of historical notes, but not yet a single history, such as we
should now hold worthy of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful
poetry. Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in
America which was fit to sparkle upon the "stretched forefinger" of
Time. Berkeley's "Westward the course of Empire" _ought_ to have been
written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her
offspring were too puny to live.
The outbreak of the Revolution arrested what little growth there was in
letters and science. Franklin carried his reputation, the first one born
of science in the country, to the French court, and West and Copley
sought fame and success, and found them, in England. All the talent we
had was absorbed in the production of political essays and state-papers.
Patriotic poems, satires, _jeux d'esprit_, with more or less of the
_esprit_ implied in their name, were produced, not sparingly; but they
find it hard work to live, except in the memory of antiquaries. Philip
Freneau is known to more readers from the fact that Campbell did him the
honor to copy a line from him without acknowledgment than by all his
rhymes. It is not gratifying to observe the want, so noticeable in our
Revolutionary period, of that inspiration which the passions of such a
struggle might have been expected to bring with them.
If we are forced to put this estimate upon our earlier achievements in
the domain of letters, it is not surprising that they were held of small
account in the mother-country. It is not fair to expect the British
critics to understand our political literature, which was until these
later years all we had to show. They had to wait until De Lolme, a Swiss
exile, explained their own Constitution to them, before they had a very
clear idea of it. One British tourist after another visited this
country, with his glass at his eye, and his small vocabulary of "Very
odd!" for all that was new to him; his "Quite so!" for whatever was
noblest in thought or deed; his "Very clever!" for the encouragement of
genius; and his "All that sort of thing, you know!" for the less
marketable virtues and heroisms not to be found in the Cockney
price-current. They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man
got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the
history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until
De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular
comprehension.
The true-born Briton read as far as the first sentence of the second
paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There he stopped, and
there he has stuck ever since. That sentence has been called a
"glittering generality,"--as if there were some shallow insincerity
about it. But because "all that glitters is not gold," it does not
follow that nothing which glitters is gold. Because a statement is
general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical.
"Glittering generality" or not, the voice which proclaimed that the
birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the _fiat lux_ of the
new-born political universe. This, and the terrible series of logical
consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties,
menacing all the hierarchies, undermining the seemingly solid
foundations of all Old-World abuses,--this parent truth, and all to
which it gave birth, made up the literature of Revolutionary America,
and dwarfed all the lesser growths of culture for the time, as the
pine-tree dwarfs the herbage beneath the circle of its spreading
branches.
As English policy had pursued the uniform course of provincializing our
industry during the colonial period, discouraging every form of native
ingenuity, so English criticism, naturally enough, after industry was
set free, discountenanced the growth of a native American literature.
That famous question of the "Quarterly Review," "Who reads an American
book?" was the key--note of the critical chorus. There were shortcomings
enough, no doubt, and all the faults that belong to an imperfectly
educated people. But there was something more than the feeling of
offended taste or unsatisfied scholarship in the _animus_ of British
criticism. Mr. Tudor has expressed the effect it produced upon our own
writers very clearly in his account of the "North American Review,"
written in 1820. He recognizes the undue deference paid to foreign
critics, and, as its consequence, "a want, or rather a suppression, of
national feeling and independent judgment, that would sooner or later
have become highly injurious."
It is not difficult to find examples, of earlier and of later date,
which illustrate the tone of British feeling towards this country, as it
has existed among leading literary men, and at times betrayed itself in
an insolence which amuses us after the first sense of irritation has
passed away.
In 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English
literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time,
wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an
Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic,
impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption.
No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus
discovered the New. Its inhabitants--the countrymen of Washington and
Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson--multiply, as he tells us, "with the
fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution
he speaks in no more flattering terms:--"Probably in _America_, as in
other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the
tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively
combustible." All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us
now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to
gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens.
In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth,
and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the
English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The
specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find
their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not
lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted
it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is
uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is its melancholy apology.
But in the interval between the cudgel-stroke of Johnson and the
mud-throwing of Carlyle, America had grown strong enough to bear the
assaults of literary bullies and mountebanks without serious annoyance.
The question which had been so superciliously asked was at last
answered. _Everybody_ reads an American book. The morning-star of our
literature rose in the genius of IRVING. There was something in his
personal conditions which singularly fitted him to introduce the New
World in its holiday-dress to the polite company of the Old World. His
father was a Scotchman, his mother was an Englishwoman, and he was born
in America. "Diedrich Knickerbocker" is a near relation of some of
Scott's characters; "Bracebridge Hall" might have been written by an
Englishman; while "Ichabod Crane" and "Rip Van Winkle" are American to
their marrow. The English naturally found Irving too much like their own
writers in his English subjects, and they could not thoroughly relish
his purely American pictures and characters. Cooper, who did not love
the English, and showed it, a navy officer, too, who dwelt with delight
on the sea-fights of the War of 1812, was too American to please them.
Dr. Channing had a limited circle of admirers in Great Britain, but
could reach only a few even of the proscribed Dissenting class in any
effective way.
Prescott, we believe, did more than any other one man to establish the
independence of American authorship. He was the first, so far as we
know, who worked with a truly adequate literary apparatus, and at the
same time brought the results of his extensive, long-continued, costly
researches into picture-like and popular forms. It was not the judgment
of England, but of Europe, that settled his claims in the world of
letters; and from the day when the verdict of the learned world awarded
him a place in the first rank of historians, the hereditary curse of
American authorship was removed, and the insolent question of the
Quarterly was asked no more.
From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and
America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English
writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United
States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a
welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British
reading constituency.
Never had the mutual interchange of literary gifts from the one people
to the other been so active as during the years preceding the outbreak
of the Great Conspiracy. So close was the communication of thought and
feeling, that it seemed as if there were hardly need of a submarine
cable to stretch its nervous strands between two national brains that
were locked in Siamese union by the swift telegraph of thought. We
reprinted each other's books, we made new reputations for each other's
authors, we wrote in each other's magazines, and introduced each other's
young writers to our own several publics. Thought echoed to thought,
voice answered to voice across the Atlantic.
But for one fatal stain upon our institutions,--a stain of which we were
constantly reminded, as the one thing that shamed all our
pretensions,--it seemed as if the peaceful and prosperous development of
the great nation sprung from the loins of England were accepted as a
gain to universal civilization. In the fulness of time the heir of Great
Britain's world-shadowing empire came among us to receive the wide and
cordial welcome which we could afford to give without compromising our
republicanism, and he to receive without lessening his dignity. It was
the seal upon the _entente cordiale_ which seemed to have at last
established itself between the thinkers as well as the authorities of
the two countries.
A few months afterwards came the great explosion which threatened the
eternal rending asunder of the Union. That the British people had but an
imperfect understanding of the quarrel, we are ready to believe. That
they were easily misled as to some of the motives and intentions of the
North is plain enough. But this one fact remains: Every one of them
knew, by public, official statements, that what _the South_ meant to do
was to build a new social and political order on Slavery,--recognized,
proclaimed, boasted of, theoretically justified, and practically
incorporated with its very principle of existence. They might have their
doubts about the character of the North, but they could have none about
the principles or intentions of the South. That ought to have settled
the question for civilized Europe. It would have done so, but that
jealousy of the great self-governing state swallowed up every other
consideration.
We will not be unjust nor ungrateful. We have as true friends, as brave
and generous advocates of our sacred cause, in Great Britain as our
fathers found in their long struggle for liberty. We have the
intelligent coöperation of a few leading thinkers, and the instinctive
sympathy of a large portion of the people,--may God be merciful to them
and to their children in the day of reckoning, which, sooner or later,
awaits a nation that is false to advancing civilization!
But, with all our gratitude to the noble few who have pleaded our cause,
we are obliged to own that we have looked in vain for sympathy in many
quarters where we should assuredly have expected it. Where is the
English Church in this momentous struggle? Has it blasted with its
anathema the rising barbarism, threatening, or rather promising, to
nationalize itself, which, as a cardinal principle, denies the Word of
God and the sanctities of the marriage relation to millions of its
subjects? or does it save its indignation for the authors of "Essays and
Reviews" and the over-curious Bishop of Natal? Where are the men whose
voices ought to ring like clarions among the hosts of their brethren in
the Free States of the North? Where is Lord Brougham, ex-apostle of the
Diffusion of Knowledge, while the question is of enforced perpetual
ignorance as the cement of that unhallowed structure with which this
nineteenth century is to be outraged, if treason has its way? Where is
Dickens, the hater of the lesser wrongs of Chancery Courts, the scourge
of tyrannical beadles and heartless schoolmasters? Has he no word for
those who are striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself
over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to
be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of
English pauperism and crime? Where is the Laureate, so full of fine
indignations and high aspirations? Has he, who holds so cheap those who
waste their genius
"To make old baseness picturesque,"
no single stanza for the great strife of this living century? is he too
busy with his old knights to remember that
"One great clime....
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic?"
has he a song for the six hundred, and not a line for the six hundred
thousand? Where is the London "Times," so long accepted as the true
index of English intelligence and enlightened humanity? Where are those
grave organs of thought which were always quarrelling with Slavery so
long as it was the thorn in the breast of our nation, but almost do
homage to it now that it is a poisoned arrow aimed at her life? Where is
the little hunchback's journal, whose wit was the dog-vane of
fashionable opinion, once pointing towards freedom as the prevailing
wind seemed to blow, now veered round to obey the poisoned breath of
Slavery? All silent or hostile, subject as they are themselves to the
overmastering influence of a class which dreads the existence of a
self-governing state, like this majestic Union, worse than falsehood,
worse than shame, worse than robbery, worse than complicity with the
foulest of rebellions, worse than partnership in the gigantic scheme
which was to blacken half a hemisphere with the night of eternal
Slavery!
It is the miserable defection of so many of the thinking class, in this
time of the greatest popular struggle known to history, which impresses
us far more than the hostility of a few land-grasping nobles, or the
coldness of a Government mainly guided by their counsels. The natural
consequence has been the complete destruction of that undue deference to
foreign judgments which was so long a characteristic of our literature.
The current English talk about the affairs that now chiefly interest us
excites us very moderately. The leading organs of thought have lost
their hold upon the mind of most thinking people among us. We have
learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to
laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. These
"outsiders" have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are
thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that
they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources. The view
they have taken of the strife in which we have been and are engaged is
not only devoid of any high moral sympathy, but utterly shallow, and
flagrantly falsified by the whole course of events, political,
financial, and military.
Perhaps we ought not to be surprised or disappointed. With a congenital
difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving
a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny,
with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American
should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past,
based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an
avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of
serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what
liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. Magna
Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting
from purely selfish motives, in behalf of their own order. The Habeas
Corpus Act was unpalatable to the Lords, and was passed only by a trick
or a blunder. What is there in common between the states which recognize
the rule of any persons who happen to be descended from the bold or
artful men who obtained their power by violence or fraud, and a state
which starts with the assumption that the government belongs to the
governed, subject, we must remember, to the laws which make a people a
nation,--laws recognized just as unhesitatingly by the Rebel States as
applying to Western Virginia or East Tennessee, as the Union recognizes
their application to these same Rebel States?
Of course, it is conceivable that we are all wrong in our theory of
human rights and our plan of government. It is possible that the true
principle of selecting the rulers of a nation is to take the descendants
of the cut-throat, the assassin, the poisoner, the traitor, who got his
foot upon a people's neck some centuries ago. It may be that there is an
American people which will hold itself fortunate, if it can be ruled
over by a descendant of Charles V.,--though Philip II. was the son of
that personage, and an American historian has made us familiar with his
doings, and those of his vicegerent, the Duke of Alva. If this is the
way that people should be governed, then we _are_ wrong, and have no
right to look for sympathy from Old-World dynasties. The only question
is, How soon it will be safe to send a Grand Duke over to govern us.
But if our theory of human rights and our plan of government are the
true ones, then our success is the inevitable downfall of every dynasty
on the face of the earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the
blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization,
culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are
working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the
empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the
splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire,
here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected
gradually and peaceably. We do not find fault with men for being born in
positions that confer powers upon them incommensurate with their rights.
We do not wish to cut a man's head off because he comes of a dull race
that has been taught for generations to think itself better than the
rest of mankind, and has learned to believe it and practise on it. But
if nations are fast becoming educated to a state in which they are
competent to manage their own interests, we wish these privileged
personages to recognize it, for their own sake, as well as for that of
the people.
The spirit of republican America is not that of a wild propagandism. It
is not by war that we have sought or should ever seek to convert the Old
World to our theories and practice in government. If this young nation
is permitted, in the Providence of God, to unfold all its possibilities
into powers, the great lesson it will teach will be that of peaceful
development. Where the public wealth is mainly for the governing class,
the splendid machinery of war is as necessary as the jewels which a
province would hardly buy are to the golden circlet that is the mark of
sovereignty. Where the wealth of a country is for the people, this
particular form of pyrotechnics is too costly to be indulged in for
amusement. American civilization hates war, as such. It values life,
because it honors humanity. It values property, because property is for
the comfort and good of all, and not merely plunder, to be wasted by a
few irresponsible lawgivers. It wants all the forces of its population
to subdue Nature to its service. It demands all the intellect of its
children for construction, not for destruction. Its business is to build
the world's great temple of concord and justice; and for this it is not
Dahlgren and Parrott that are the architects, but men of thought, of
peace, of love.
Let us not, therefore, waste our strength in threats of vengeance
against those misguided governments who mistook their true interest in
the prospect of our calamity. We can conquer them by peace better than
by war. When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke,--her crest
towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of Rebel
armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil-wishers, her breast
heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest
enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war,--her triumph
will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which
the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones. No deeper humiliation
could be asked for our foreign enemies than the spectacle of our
triumph. If we have any legal claims against the accomplices of pirates,
they will be presented, and they will be paid. If there are any
uncomfortable precedents which have been introduced into international
law, the jealous "Mistress of the Seas" must be prepared to face them in
her own hour of trouble. Had her failings but leaned to Freedom's
side,--had she but been true to her traditions, to her professions, to
her pretended principles,--where could she have found a truer ally than
her own offspring, in the time of trial which is too probably preparing
for her? "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the
things which belong unto thy peace!" No tardy repentance can efface the
record of the past. We may forgive, but history is inexorable.
England was startled the other day by an earthquake. The fast-anchored
isle was astonished at such a tropical phenomenon. It was all very well
for Jamaica or Manila, but who would have thought of solid,
constitutional England shaking like a jelly? The London "Times"
moralized about it in these words:--"We see, afar off, a great empire,
that had threatened to predominate over all mankind, suddenly broken up
by moral agencies, and shattered into no one knows how many fragments.
We are safe from that fate, at least so we deem ourselves, for never
were we so united." "_A great empire, that had threatened to predominate
over all mankind_." That was the trouble. That was the reason the
"Times" was so pleased to say, a few months ago, "The bubble has burst."
How, if the great empire should prove not to have been shattered? how,
if the bubble has not burst?--nay, if that great system of intelligent
self-government which was taken for a bubble prove to be a sphere of
adamant, rounded in the mould of Divine Law, and filled with the pure
light of Heaven?
England is happy in a virtuous queen; but what if another profligate
like George IV. should, by the accident of birth, become the heir of her
sovereignty? France is as strong as one man's life can make her; but
what if that man should run against some fanatic's idea which had taken
shape in a bullet-mould, or receive a sudden call from that pale visitor
who heeds no challenge from the guards at the gate of the Tuileries, and
stalks unannounced through antechambers and halls of audience?
The "Times" might have found a moral for the earthquake nearer home. The
flame that sweeps our prairies is terrible, but it only scorches the
surface. What all the governments based on smothered pauperism,
tolerated ignorance, and organized degradation have to fear is the
subterranean fire, which finds its vent in blazing craters, or breaks up
all the ancient landmarks in earth-shattering convulsions. God forbid
that we should invoke any such catastrophe even for those who have been
hardest upon us in our bitter trial! Yet so surely as American society
founds itself upon the rights of civilized man, there is no permanent
safety for any nation but in the progressive recognition of the American
principle. The right of governing a nation belongs to the people of the
nation; and the urgent duty of those provisional governments which we
call monarchies, empires, aristocracies is to educate their people with
a view to the final surrender of all power into their hands. A little
longer patience, a little more sacrifice, a little more vigorous,
united action, on the part of the Loyal States, and the Union will
behold herself mirrored in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the stateliest
of earthly empires,--not in her own aspiring language, but by the
confession of her most envious rival, _predominating over all mankind_.
No Tartar hordes pouring from the depths of Asia, no Northern barbarians
swarming out of the hive of nations, no Saracens sweeping from their
deserts to plant the Crescent over the symbol of Christendom, were more
terrible to the principalities and powers that stood in their way, than
the Great Republic, by the bare fact of its existence, will become to
every government which does not hold its authority from the people.
However our present conflict may seem at first sight to do violence, in
certain respects, to the principles of self-government, everybody knows
that it is a strife of democratic against oligarchic institutions, of a
progressive against a stationary civilization, of the rights of manhood
against the claims of a class, of a national order representing the will
of a people against a conspiracy organized by a sectional minority.
Just so far as _the people_ of Europe understand the nature of our armed
controversy, they will understand that we are pleading their cause. Nay,
if the mass of our Southern brethren did but know it, we are pleading
theirs just as much. The emancipation of industry has never taken effect
in the South, and never could until labor ceased to be degrading.
We should be unreasonable to demand the sympathy of those classes which
have everything to lose from the extension of the self-governing
principle. What we have to thank them for is the frankness with which
they have betrayed their hostility to us and our cause, under
circumstances which showed that they would ruin us, if it could be done
safely and decently. We shall never be good friends again, it may be
feared, until we change our eagles into sovereigns, or they change their
sovereigns for a coin which bears the head of Liberty. But in the mean
time it is a great step in our education to find out that a new order of
civilization requires new modes of thought, which must, of necessity,
shape themselves out of our conditions. Thus it seems probable, that, as
the first revolution brought about our industrial independence of the
mother-country, not preventing us in any way from still availing
ourselves of the skill of her trained artisans, so this second civil
convulsion will complete that intellectual independence towards which we
have been growing, without cutting us off from whatever in knowledge or
art is the common property of Republics and Despotisms.
* * * * *