A flood of diplomatic and official correspondence has come over
from the United States, completing the set to which President Polk's message belonged. It is not calculated to raise the na- tional character in European estimation. Ability, of a kind, of course there is ; for some sort of capacity is essential to the at- tainment of office in a republic : but the low tone of the morals traceable throughout implies a low standard of intellect. To say that the United States seem to have set aside their real statesmen, self-reduced to the condition that this country would be in if deprived of its Parliamentary statesmen and Metropolitan press, and left to its borough politicians and provincial newspapers, 'Would be to libel many of our distant contemporaries and many an aspiring Town-Clerk or Common Councillor. But in the Ameri- can public writings, the height of ambition seems to be to obtain an advantage. Inordinate grasp of appropriation, because it deals with provinces, things materially big, is confounded with great- ness of purpose. As their warrant, the political moralists of the Union naively literalize the satirical remark that a great conqueror is only a robber on a great scale : they seem to think that to rob on a great scale is to be great, and that all the world has agreed that it is. We have heard that such is a grand canon of private life in the Union : it now appears in their na- tional documents. Alas, that a great nation should write itself down a knave !
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