AN ENGLISH DISSENTER IN AMERICA.* Tilts is a fresh and
pleasant book about America, which may impress and instruct the literary class and English society all the more by the peculiarity of the point of view from which it is written. As the occupant of a front place in the ranks of English Dissent, possessing recognized power as a leader of opinion, and commanding just respect beyond sectarian limits for his gifts of popular eloquence, the writer sees American things from an unusual stand-point. His associations, and habits of thought and expression have all a special colour ; and the insight being good and true so far as it goes, the result is an American sketch-book which well deserves to be read. We say this in spite of abundant faults of taste, judged by any good standard, and of a great deal of extraneous matter which fills up what is, after all, a very slight volume. We should hardly expect much from a writer who, after the manner of the weaker clergy, interjects notes of the texts from which he preaches ; thinks proper to explain the mode of heaving the log at sea ; catalogues a Cunard steamer's machinery to introduce the sapient remark, "Wonderful that such a body of fire can be maintained in the midst of the water and yet not consume the ship I" and adapts natural occur- rences to the illustration of evangelical theology after the astonish- ing fashion of missionaries in their diaries, as, for instance, in this passage :-
"As those birds dew backward, upward, sideways, and in circles, it was difficult to remember that all the time they wore also sailing onwards with us at the rate of twelve or fourteen miles an hour. Their motion suggested the truo idea of the Christian life, which should combine all that is lawful and innocent in the present, with a constant progress towards the future life ; unlike the ascetic who keeps, or thinks ha keeps, one dull, straight line ; unlike the worldling who sweeps upward and downward and around, but makes no progress onward."
But it would be a mistake to attach much importance to these faults, or object that ordinary incidents of travel are largely intro- duced, and that an immense quantity of Niagara is inflicted. We must imagine, after all, that Newman Hall is Newman Hall, with a reverent religious world receiving open-mouthed the record of what happened to him, accustomed to be feted a good deal in his own line like an English prince in the colonies, and there- fore falling naturally into a tone which sounds odd to an irreverent litterateur. And the stuff in the book is really very good. There- is more than one graphic touch of American life, such as the story of the fruit-boy in a train, who, while selling him fruit, unhesi- tatingly took hold of a pin in his necktie and examined it minutely ; the Yankee who, in a State where a price was set on wolves, was feeding up three young ones he had caught, because a larger price was given for the grown-up than for the little ones ; and the imitative hand-shaking of the children at a Chicago school, to save him the trouble of shaking hands all round. The cha- racteristic American recklessness has again hardly been better put than in the following conversation, a propos of the writer's falling
* From Liverpool to St. Louis. By the Rev. Newman Hall. London and New York : George Rentledge and Son. 1870. into a ditch on his way home from a camp illumination at West Point :— " Next morning I found my wrist swollen, and I had to carry my arm in a sling for a week. At breakfast I mentioned the circumstance to an American who inquired what ailed me. His remark was peculiar. Oh, you Britishers—you've no intellects !'—' Indeed !' said I; 'pray, sir, what do you mean ?'—' Why, in your country there would have been a lamp and a rail.'—' Just so,' I answered, 'and that, I think, is a proof that we have intellects.'—' You don't see what I mean : you don't use your intellects. Why, if such a thing were to happen in your country, 'guess you'd bring an action against the man who left the road like that. You'll get no damages in this country, I tell you. In your country, if a man asks me to go down a mine with him, I go at once without question. But If asked to do so here, I first look at the basket, and the rope, and the engine, and see that all's right before I trust my life to him. In your country they take care of you without your having to take care of yourself. In this country you must use your intellect, sir ! Take my advice—use your intellect.'" These and other touches exhibit the shrewdness of the observer outside his peculiar field ; and a good many of the remarks, we may add, on the course of trade and business and the rate of wages, are especially instructive and interesting. Had the writer devoted himself to observing Americans more, his book might have competed with the best travellers' works we have had The main " argument " of the book is intimately connected with the writer's position,—that of the general likeness of America to England, and the superiority of America where there is a con- trast. Everywhere the author speaks as if he was among his own people, thoroughly at home, used to their ways, noticing minor differences of custom just as one might notice them in the imusehold of one's own cousins who really had a family likeness. This impression is so far summed up in his own words in an address on "International Relations," which he frequently delivered in America :— "Nothing was more strongly impressed on my mind during my visit to your country than the substantial unity of our two nations. When seated at your hospitable tables ; when gathering with your households round the dear old family Bible; when worshipping in your churches and ministering in your pulpits,—but for tho absence of those most dear to me, I might have forgotten that a groat ocean rolled between us. In your Courts of Justice I found the same Common Law administered, the same precedents quoted. And when visiting scenes of historic fame, it seemed to me that Englishmen might claim an interest in them as well as Americans." The feeling is unmistakably genuine, and there is no doubt that the author never really felt he was out of his own world, but for the occasional conviction at which we have hinted that it was more than his own world, being in fact that world purified and glorified, 'in all points where it contrasted superior to the England he had left. In short, America is England plus the facts that there are no Dissenters, that Episcopalians and Congregationalists are social -equals, that, on the whole, there is more tolerance and liberality and mutual courtesy among "Christian denominations," and that the clergy are better paid and on a higher social level than the Dissenting clergy of England, the contributions of the people to religious purposes and education being also, on the whole, more liberal. What could be more enchanting altogether than a world of this sort to an English Dissenter, even if the writer had not been personally feted to a remarkable extent, invited to preach to Congress, the object of an ovation in Wall Street, which suspended business to hear him speak a few words, and the lion of a hundred towns ? How could it possibly be thought that the people were unlike the English, or had a different civilization, or were doing anything but occupy " that vast inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon race, where the English nation have a second home in which to .develop their institutions and rejoice in the gifts of Providence"? Now, a natural view like this, the opinion of America by a man who was really at home in it, cannot but have a large amount of truth in it ; and it is the truth, we think, that in one aspect the Americans are a community of English middle-class Dissenters, with much the same degree of enlightenment, and the same sort of prejudices, but without the burden of struggling, as in Eng- land, against a vary powerful and hitherto dominant, influence which is not of the same type. We could not imagine any American clergyman coming over to this country and receiving the popular honours which Newman Hall did in America, though among a class, and no doubt a very large class, he-would be ran after, just as popular divines at home are lionized. But, no doubt, if Newman Hall and Mr. Spurgeon occupied the position here which the principal clergymen do in America, we should all take a more lively interest in the proceedings of American ministers. The view, nevertheless, is obviously one-sided both of America and England. There is, at least, another England. Some time ago, commenting on the American travels of an English Church clergyman, Mr. Zincke, we noticed that his predomi- nant feeling was a sense of the unlikeness of Americans ; they were not the sort of English he had been used to. And as Mr. Zincke was equally a shrewd observer, we may be sure there was a radical difference in the point of view. As we re- marked at the time, Mr. Zincke would probably have felt as strange as he felt in America, among masses of his own countrymen, —a remark strongly confirmed by the present volume, which shows us a representative of the masses we were thinking of thoroughly at home in America ; but still there is a different point of view from that of a feeling of thorough likeness with Americans which a genuine Englishman may take. No doubt the feeling crops out here, and is even expressly insisted on, that the English world, which the writer is familiar with, is the whole of England ; that the English " people " have hitherto been in subjection to an aristocracy which is fast being beaten down ; but we confess we find it some- what difficult to imagine the middle-class Dissenters, even with all Mr. Newman Hall's culture, becoming the representative type of England. After all, the class whom Mr. Zincke so fairly repre- sented, are not quite without power ; and the power of such classes indicates a real difference in the present composition of the com- munities of Americans and Englishmen. As to America, again, in spite of the predominance of what can be described as a cer- tain type of Dissent, we can only suppose that its characteristic civilization is in embryo. There are certainly other worlds in the States than the one amid which our author was at home. If America produces nothing more than he saw, we should be appalled at the monotony of the prospect. Why the Americans for a generation or two should have managed to give themselves up to a second-rate culture and civilization of a most monotonous type is a mystery, and is not wholly accounted for by the supposed conditions of a new country ; but we need not yet abandon the hope of higher human products from that country than the British middle-class of the type best known to Mr. Newman Hall, some- what idealized and improved. One of the principal missions of our author was to address the Americans on "International Relations," for which service he is entitled to the thanks of both countries. Naturally, he insists rather too much on the oneness of the two peoples, and tries to make out that the English nation was not an assenting party in the Alabama evasion, which we should like to be true ; but he shows very well how much the Americans have to answer for in the false impressions of Englishmen about them, and that at the worst there was always in England a strong pro-Federal party, while the Southern cause, from the very shame of its par- tizans, never commanded the full enthusiasm of popular sympathy. But the topic of "international relations" has fortunately lost that intensity of interest which it had before the present suspension of the Alabama negotiations.
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