North America - Volume 2 By Anthony Trollope 




















































































































































 -   We must
admit that they have been great, and free, and prosperous, as we
also have become.  And we must - Page 265
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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!

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