Part 33 (1/2)
Firmly convinced, from my earliest schoolboy days, of the intimate connexion which exists between boasting and bullying, I had long blushed to feel how pre-eminent my own country was in the ign.o.ble practice; but a more intimate acquaintance with the United States has thoroughly satisfied me that that pre-eminence justly belongs to the great Republic. But it is not merely in national matters that this feeling exhibits itself; you observe it in ordinary life as well, by the intense love shown for t.i.tles; n.o.body is contented until he obtain some rank. I am aware this is a feature inseparable from democracy. Everybody you meet is Captain, Colonel, General, Honourable, Judge, or something; and if they cannot obtain it legitimately, they obtain it by courtesy, or sometimes facetiously, like a gentleman I have before alluded to, who obtained the rank of judge because he was a connoisseur in wine. In these, and a thousand other ways, the love of vanity stands nationally revealed.
I do not think Americans are aware what injustice they do themselves by this love of high-sounding t.i.tles.[CL] For instance, in a paper before me, I see a Deputy Sheriff calling on the mob to resist the law; I see Governor Bigler authorizing General King to call out the military, one naturally supposes to keep order; but observe he calls Mr. Walker, of Erie, a traitor and a scoundrel; of the directors and managers of the railroad, he says, ”We will whip them, will whip them, will bury them so deep electricity can't reach them--we will whip them--we will whip the g--ts out of them!” &c.--Now, judging of these people by their t.i.tles, as recognised by the rest of the civilized world, what a disgrace to the higher cla.s.ses of Americans is the foregoing! But anybody who really knows the t.i.tle system of the Republic will at once see that the orator was a mere rowdy. Thus they suffer for their vanity. It pervades every cla.s.s of the whole community, from the rowdy, who talks of ”whipping creation,” to the pulpit orator, who often heralds forth past success to feed the insatiable appet.i.te: in short, it has become a national disease; and were it not for the safety-valve formed by the unmeasured terms of mutual vituperation they heap upon each other on occasions of domestic squabbles, their fate would a.s.suredly be that of the frog in the fable.
In the medical world, it is said no one has a cold without fever; and I think it may with equal truth be a.s.serted of the national world, no nations are vain without being afflicted with sensitiveness: at all events, it is true as regards the United States. No maiden in her teens is so ticklishly sensitive as the Americans. I do not refer merely to that portion of the community of which I have selected Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, as the type; I allude also to the far higher order of intelligence with which the Republic abounds. There is a touchiness about them all with respect to national and local questions which I never saw equalled: in fact, the few sheets of their Press which reach this country are alone sufficient to convince any one on that point; for in a free country the Press may always be fairly considered, to a certain extent, as the reflex of the public mind. I suppose it is with nations as with individuals, and that each are alike blind to their own failings. In no other way can I account for the Republic overlooking so entirely the sensitiveness of others. Take for instance the appointment of M. Soule--a Frenchman naturalized in America--as minister to the court of Spain. I do not say that he was a Filibustero, but he was universally supposed to be identified with that party; and if he were not so identified, he showed a puerile ignorance of the requirements of a Minister, quite beyond conception, when he received a serenade of five thousand people at New York, who came in procession, bearing aloft the accompanying transparencies, he being at the time accredited to his new ministry.
On the first transparency was the following motto:--
A STAR. PIERCE.
SOULe. CUBA.
On the second banner:--
YOUNG AMERICA AND YOUNG CUBA.
Free thought and free speech for the Cubans.
'Tis no flight of fancy, for Cuba must be, and 'tis Written by fate, an isle Great and free.
O pray, ye doomed tyrants, Your fate's not far: A dread Order now watches you,-- It is the Lone Star.
On the third banner:--
Cuba must and shall be free.
The Antilles Flower, The true Key of the Gulf, Must be plucked from the Crown Of the Old Spanish Wolf.
Monumental representation--a tomb and a weeping willow. On the tomb were the words--
LOPEZ AND CRITTENDEN,
AGUERO AND ARMATERO.
They and their companions are not forgotten.
M. Soule accepts the compliment, and makes a speech, in which he informs his audience that he cannot believe ”that this mighty nation can be chained now within the narrow limits which fettered the young Republic of America,” &c.
Change the scene, and let any American judge in the following supposed and parallel case. Imagine expeditions fitted out in England, in spite of Government, to free the slaves in the Southern States; imagine a Lopez termination to the affair, and the rowdy blood of England forming other Filibustero expeditions; then imagine the Hon. Mr. Tenderheart identifying himself with them, and receiving an appointment as minister to Was.h.i.+ngton; after which, imagine him serenaded at St. James's by thousands of people bearing transparencies, the first representing a naked woman under the slave-driver's lash; the second, containing some such verses as ”The Antilles Flower,” &c.; for instance:--
”The slaves must be plucked From the chains that now gall 'em, Though American wolves An inferior race call 'em.”
Let the minister accept the serenade, and address the mult.i.tude, declaring ”that this mighty nation can no longer be chained down to pa.s.sive interference,” &c. Let me ask any American how the Hon. Mr.
Tenderheart would be received at Was.h.i.+ngton, particularly if a few days after he took a shot at his French colleague because another person insulted him in that gentleman's house?--I ask, what would Americans say if such a line of conduct were to be pursued towards them? I might go further, and suppose that a conclave of English Ministers met at Quebec, and discussed the question as to how far the flouris.h.i.+ng town of Buffalo, so close on the frontier, was calculated to endanger the peace and prosperity of Canada, and then imagine them winding up their report with this clause--If it be so--”then by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from its present owners.” The American who penned that sentence must possess a copy of the Scriptures unknown to the rest of the world. Surely America must imagine she has the monopoly of all the sensitiveness in the world, or she would never have acted by Spain as she has done. How humiliated must she feel while contemplating the contrast between her act in appointing the minister, and Spain's demeanour in her silent and dignified reception of him!
This same sensitiveness peeps out in small things as well as great, especially where England is concerned: thus, one writer discovers that the Americans speak French better than the English; probably he infers it from having met a London Cit who had run over to Paris for a quiet Sunday, and who asked him ”_Moosyere, savvay voo oo ey lay Toolureeze?”_ Another discovers that American society is much more sought after than English; that Americans are more agreeable, more intelligent, more liberal, &c.; but the comparison is always with England or the English.
And why all this? Simply because it feeds the morbid appet.i.te of many Republican citizens, which the pure truth would not.
This sensitiveness also shows itself in the way they watch the opinions of their country expressed by _The Times_, or by any largely circulating paper. I remember an American colonel who had been through the whole Mexican war, saying to me one day, ”I a.s.sure you the Mexican troops are the most contemptible soldiers in the world; I would rather a thousand to one face them than half the number of Camanche Indians.”--The object of this remark was to show on what slight and insufficient grounds _The Times_ had spoken of the United States as a great military nation since the Mexican war. An article giving them due credit for a successful campaign was easily magnified beyond its intended proportions, and my gallant friend was modestly disclaiming so high-sounding an appellation; but such evidently was the construction which he felt his countrymen had put upon it.
I turn now for a few moments to the question of Morals; and here, again, it is of course only in a wholesale manner I can treat of the subject.
As far as my inquiries enable me to judge, I find the same elements producing the same results here as in England. Wherever ma.s.ses are cl.u.s.tered together most largely, there vice runs as rampant as in England; nay, I have the authority of a lecture delivered at the Maryland Inst.i.tute, for saying that it is even worse in many places.