I Take This Statement From An
Article In The Times, In Which The Question Of The Finances Of The
United States Is Handled.
But our population in 1796 was only
sixteen millions.
I estimate the population of the Northern section
of the United States, as the States will be after the war, at
twenty-two millions. In the article alluded to, these Northern
Americans are now stated to be twenty millions. If then we, in
1796, could pay fourteen millions a year with a population of
sixteen millions, the United States, with a population of twenty or
twenty-two millions, will be able to pay the sixteen or seventeen
millions sterling of interest which will become due from them, if
their circumstances of payment are as good as were ours. They can
do that, and more than that, if they have the same means per man as
we had. And as the means per man resolves itself at last into the
labor per man, it may be said that they can pay what we could pay,
if they can and will work as hard as we could and did work. That
which did not crush us will not crush them, if their future energy
be equal to our past energy.
And on this question of energy I think that there is no need for
doubt. Taking man for man and million for million, the Americans
are equal to the English in intellect and industry. They create
wealth, at any rate, as fast as we have done. They develop their
resources, and open out the currents of trade, with an energy equal
to our own. They are always at work - improving, utilizing, and
creating. Austria, as I take it, is succumbing to monetary
difficulties, not because she has been extravagant, but because she
has been slow at progress; because it has been the work of her
rulers to repress rather than encourage the energies of her people;
because she does not improve, utilize, and create. England has
mastered her monetary difficulties because the genius of her
government and her people has been exactly opposite to the genius of
Austria. And the States of America will master their money
difficulties, because they are born of England, and are not born of
Austria. What! Shall our eldest child become bankrupt in its first
trade difficulty; be utterly ruined by its first little commercial
embarrassment! The child bears much too strong a resemblance to its
parent for me to think so.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE POST-OFFICE.
Any Englishman or Frenchman residing in the American States cannot
fail to be struck with the inferiority of the post-office
arrangements in that country to those by which they are accommodated
in their own country. I have not been a resident in the country,
and as a traveler might probably have passed the subject without
special remark, were it not that the service of the post-office has
been my own profession for many years. I could therefore hardly
fail to observe things which to another man would have been of no
material moment.
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