Our Progressive Independence

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 laborand moneysaving 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 WestIndia 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 ofits 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 readymade 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, LieutenantGovernor 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 nailcutting 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-fireengine. 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 wondrous 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 objectglass,” 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 mothercountry. 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 recognises 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 countrymenofWashington 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 cudgelstroke 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

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 OldWorld 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, anil 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 selfgovernment, 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.