If She Can Make Her
Port, Saving Life And Cargo, She Is A Good Ship, Let Her Losses In
Spars And Rigging Be What They May.
In this affair of the habeas
corpus we will wait awhile before we come to any final judgment.
If
it be that the people, when the war is over, shall consent to live
under a military or other dictatorship, that they shall quietly
continue their course as a nation without recovery of their rights
of freedom, then we shall have to say that their institutions were
not founded in a soil of sufficient depth, and that they gave way
before the first high wind that blew on them. I myself do not
expect such a result.
I think we must admit that the Americans have received from their
government, or rather from their system of policy, that aid and
furtherance which they required from it; and, moreover, such aid and
furtherance as we expect from our system of government. We must
admit that they have been great, and free, and prosperous, as we
also have become. And we must admit also that in some matters they
have gone forward in advance of us. They have educated their
people, as we have not educated ours. They have given to their
millions a personal respect, and a standing above the abjectness of
poverty, which with us are much less general than with them. These
things, I grant, have not come of their government, and have not
been produced by their written Constitution. They are the happy
results of their happy circumstances. But so also are not those
evil attributes which we sometimes assign to them the creatures of
their government or of their Constitution. We acknowledge them to
be well educated, intelligent, philanthropic, and industrious; but
we say that they are ambitious, unjust, self-idolatrous, and
irreligious. If so, let us at any rate balance the virtues against
the vices. As to their ambition, it is a vice that leans so to
virtue's side that it hardly needs an apology. As to their
injustice, or rather dishonesty, I have said what I have to say on
that matter. I am not going to flinch from the accusation I have
brought, though I am aware that in bringing it I have thrown away
any hope that I might have had of carrying with me the good-will of
the Americans for my book. The love of money - or rather of making
money - carried to an extreme, has lessened that instinctive respect
for the rights of meum and tuum, which all men feel more or less,
and which, when encouraged within the human breast, finds its result
in perfect honesty. Other nations, of which I will not now stop to
name even one, have had their periods of natural dishonesty. It may
be that others are even now to be placed in the same category. But
it is a fault which industry and intelligence combined will after
awhile serve to lessen and to banish. The industrious man desires
to keep the fruit of his own industry, and the intelligent man will
ultimately be able to do so. That the Americans are self-idolaters
is perhaps true - with a difference. An American desires you to
worship his country, or his brother; but he does not often, by any
of the usual signs of conceit, call upon you to worship himself; as
an American, treating of America, he is self-idolatrous; that is a
self-idolatry which I can endure. Then, as to his want of religion -
and it is a very sad want - I can only say of him that I, as an
Englishman, do not feel myself justified in flinging the first stone
at him. In that matter of religion, as in the matter of education,
the American, I think, stands on a level higher than ours. There is
not in the States so absolute an ignorance of religion as is to be
found in some of our manufacturing and mining districts, and also,
alas! in some of our agricultural districts; but also, I think,
there is less of respect and veneration for God's word among their
educated classes than there is with us; and, perhaps, also less
knowledge as to God's word. The general religious level is, I
think, higher with them; but there is, if I am right in my
supposition, with us a higher eminence in religion, as there is also
a deeper depth of ungodliness.
I think, then, that we are bound to acknowledge that the Americans
have succeeded as a nation, politically and socially. When I speak
of social success, I do not mean to say that their manners are
correct according to this or that standard; I will not say that they
are correct or are not correct. In that matter of manners I have
found those with whom it seemed to me natural that I should
associate very pleasant according to my standard. I do not know
that I am a good critic on such a subject, or that I have ever
thought much of it with the view of criticising; I have been happy
and comfortable with them, and for me that has been sufficient. In
speaking of social success I allude to their success in private life
as distinguished from that which they have achieved in public life;
to their successes in commerce, in mechanics, in the comforts and
luxuries of life, in physic and all that leads to the solace of
affliction, in literature, and I may add also, considering the youth
of the nation, in the arts. We are, I think, bound to acknowledge
that they have succeeded. And if they have succeeded, it is vain
for us to say that a system is wrong which has, at any rate,
admitted of such success. That which was wanted from some form of
government, has been obtained with much more than average
excellence; and therefore the form adopted has approved itself as
good.
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