If 36 Millions Of Frenchmen, Or 46 Millions Of Germans,
Submit To A Despotic Government, It Is Because They Do Not Really
Desire Anything Better.
"If they wished for a different form of Government they could have it.
What presumption in us to think that our interference in the
matter can be necessary!
"Believe me, faithfully yours,
"RICHARD COBDEN.
"EDWD. WATKIN, Esq."
I venture here a few extracts from my little book of 1851, as detailing
my views, new and fresh as they were, on American questions.
* * * * *
"I have presumed to think that these hasty Letters, destitute as they
are of all literary merit, written during a visit to the 'New World,'
may be, just now, worth presenting to 'every-day sort of people,' like
myself, who have little time to travel; and, unable to do both, would
rather watch the free growth of a new country, than observe the
decadence and decrepitude of old ones. For just now, when a large part
of our labouring population is strangely awakening to the impression,
that a dollar a-day and a vote at elections in the United States are
better than eightpence a-day in Ireland; the New Home to which our
fellow-countrymen are thus flocking - and in which, somehow or other,
they prosper and are independent - is especially interesting.
"Steam navigation and railways have so far reduced the difficulties and
uncertainties of Western travel, that it is now as easy and as cheap to
spend one's autumn holidays, as I have done, in a trip to America of
some eleven thousand miles out-and-home, as fifteen years ago it was to
get to John o' Groats and back by land conveyance, or to go a-shooting
in Sutherlandshire - which, by-the-bye, is an out of the way and dismal
sort of county even yet.
"Every one ought to know how easy it is, and how pleasant and
instructive, to travel in the States. But, though many people do know
this, the plague of English travellers which annually overspreads
Europe, from July to December, and disturbs even the quiet of the Nile,
has hardly touched America. And while one cannot enter the drawing-room
of any decent house without hearing descriptions of scenery and manners
in Germany, Italy, or Russia, - to have visited America almost involves
the suspicion of some commercial connection with that country. Yet no
other land in the world has so close an alliance with our own; and,
while we are culpably ignorant of almost everything but its
peculiarities and its vices, no other country studies our history, and
watches our progress, with greater interest or more solicitude. Any
English youngster will tell you that Americans speak through their
noses, spit, and hold slaves; but how few, even of the most
intelligent, know that better English is spoken by the mass of
Americans, than by the majority of English citizens, and that education
is practically an institution of the United States, and universal;
though at home it hardly exists as a system, and can never be extended
in any truly national direction without exciting a war of parties!
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