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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