5 JULY 1856, Page 14

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE UNITED STATES.

THE rapid growth and grand destiny of the United States of America have been for many years a favourite topic of writers and politicians who for one cause or other are discontented with. the institutions and manners of the older countries of Europe. " We air a great nation, we air ; and, I calculate we progress at a rate that makes you Europeans sick with envy and. despair " is a formula accepted almost as readily at Paris or London, and as devoutly believed, as by the Yankee who gives frequent utterance to it in his improved English. And certainly there is much. in the circumstances of the United States that may well cause the statesman and the peasant of Europe to sigh as he thinks OIL the difference. The one has his taxes to raise, the other has. the no less disagreeable task of paying them ; the former is. always perplexed with the fearful problem of /Pauperism in the mass, the latter has a constant struggle with the difficulties of poverty. The real problem of European statesmanship has long been, how to make the material condition of the lowest class suffi- ciently comfortable to allow society as a whole to advance steadily towards its ideal ; and the European proletaire finds himself, now that most of his arbitrary fetters have been struck off, as de- pressed as ever by the necessities of unintermitting labour, and perhaps farther removed from any chances of a brilliant or joyous existence than his progenitors of five centuries back. American statesmen have not yet begun to encounter this primary problem in any appreciable degree of difficulty. A virgin soil everywhere offers abundant resources, upon which population does not even threaten to press ; a large family is a fortune to a poor man, and a life of freedom and plenty is open to all who have strength to labour with industry and frugality to use their oppor- tunities. And. the result is a rapidity of increase in the number of the people which only serves more rapidly to develop the mar- vellous resources of the land, its rich fertility of soil, its magnifi- cent natural water communication, its variety of climate and pro- duction, its grand advantages of geographical position. No won- der that both the governing classes of Europe and the most nume- rous of the classes that make up our social scale should often look with longing eyes across the Atlantic, and that to the latter Ame- rica should be the land of promise, offering to their imaginations all that is wanting at home to make life delightful, and to sweeten. the toil to which they only object when in excess and without its natural rewards and consolations.

We have been in England long accustomed to qualify the pic- ture by the slight drawback, that not even the boundless re- sources of the United States sufficed absolutely to prevent the stif- fering and humiliation of such poverty as arose from the incapa- city of individuals ; that the great cities of the Union presented. that poverty, in as squalid and debased a form as our own ; and that the evil was on the increase, through the indiscriminate exo- dus of European paupers irrespective of their moral and physical fitness for the circumstances of the country. We have been long fsmilinr with the fact that the manners u.9.c1 social habits of Ameri- cans are not to our taste, and that few persons who could obtain a respectable maintenance in Europe would find the change to the United States a change for the better. It has been known that the political institutions of America have not been favourable to the growth of that true freedom which allows to the individual and to the minority the right of differing from the majority for the time being without repression or offence ; that faction has raged with an extreme violence unknown among ourselves ; that the personal demeanour of public men has been indecent and outrageous ; and that the republic which is founded on an equality. of rights cannot tolerate superiority of fortune, of cha- racter, or of taste, but resents them as violations of its funda- mental principle, and logically excludes their possessors from any practical share of political power. We have seen the safeguards that the wiser statesmen. of the Revolution thought necessary, one by one removed, the integrity of the bench endangered. in one State after another, the person l honesty of members of Congress and Senators rendered something more than suspicious, solemn. Federal compacts set at nought by reckless majorities, and. many other symptoms which were discerned in their early stages by acute observers, and have since assumed alarming pro- portions. All this, however, has been looked upon as the ne- cessary result of the gradual expansion of the territorial sway and of the full development of the political system of the Republic. Hopeful men have watched these symptoms as the growing pains in the expanding limbs of the youth or the mere awkwardness of hobbledehoyhood ; and political speculators have been rather interested than. anxious curious to note each new phase of growth with its characteristic birth-throes, never doubting that, whatever taiungh the perfect organism might ht turn'out, a tame process of growth and transformation was • place before their eyes, and that Providence was shaping a mighty people for grand purposes by a discipline necessary to evolve its peculiar powers and aptitudes.

It is in startling contrast with our ordinary train of thought about the United States to hear it even whispered as a possibility, that the race of men which inhabit the country is undergoing a process of physical and moral degeneracy ; that the symptoms we have been accustomed to consider as evidences of growth are really proofs of decay ; that the people are, like medlars, rotten before they are ripe ; and that a premature senility is the true charac- teristic of the great Anglo-Celtic Republic of the West. That such

a theory should have been started, gives one a shock, which does not pass off when the facts upon which it professes to rest are calmly considered. It is said, for instance, that the bulk of Americans live thoroughly unwholesome lives ; consuming inor- dinate quantifies of spirituous liquors from youth upward and at all hours of the day, smoking and chewing tobacco to excess, eat- ing greedily and giving themselves no time to digest their food, always in a bustle and excitement, enjoying neither quiet nor rational recreation nor domestic peace. And how few Americans has any Englishman known of whom he could say that they were genial or happy I what an anxious nervous,haggard expression of face, is that by which we instinctively recognize a Yankee every- where ! how completely the manner and countenance and figure of the typical Yankee answer to this account of the usual life of the people ! Then their women, so remarkable for delicate beauty of tint and grace of figure in early youth, become prematurely old ; and this is attributed, not without rational ground, to their mode of life quite as much as to any peculiarity of their climate. The fact at any rate is unquestionable' that the women of the United States cease to be attractive at the very age when English- women attain their highest and most perfect harmony of charms. What if the bad habits of men and women acting with a climate that tends to exhaust vitality, should really in a few generations have produced a palpable inferiority of physique ? The positive assertion of this degeneration would indeed be most unphllosophi- cal on a basis of facts such as are patent to common observation ; but that these facts are patent is sufficient to excite the alarm and sharpen the self-watchfulness of all classes of Americans who can look forward to the tremendous consequences of a de- gradation of the national nerve and muscle through intemperance and bad habits of living. There are unfortunately, social and, political phenomena cha- racteristic Of the United States, which, when the thoughts are once set on this track, only too plainly lend themselves to the theory that the country is not improving, however unquestionable may be its advance in numbers, in wealth, in territory, and in political influence. The increase of numbers has been attended with the admission of the lowest class to such a preponderance of political power, and their tastes and opinions prevail so much, that the exclusion of the class most distinguished for wealth, for leisure, and such culture as comes from these is said to be prac- tically complete. A kindred tendency is also asserted to have shown itself of late years in the exclusion even of individuals from popular favour because of their eminent character and ta- lents. However exaggerated such charges may be, the tendency must be somewhat marked to have rendered their assertion and familiar repetition possible. And we know for ourselves, that the vast increase of the United States in wealth and numbers has not been accompanied by the rise of men in art, literature, or learning, who can take rank with the first- class names of Europe in those departments of activity. It would seem as if whatever genius the nation may have had been with- drawn to material pursuits, and all nobler excitements abandoned for the one excitement of making and spending fortunes. It fol- lows as a matter of couriie; that where fortunes are rapidly made, and rich men are jealously excluded from those spheres of action which employ so much of their energy in Europe, a low mode of expenditure should be common among them; and accordingly, the fashionable classes of American society are more notorious for their luxury than for their refinement or ambition. Then who can fail to note as a significant fact, when we are inquiring into the real progress of the American people that crimes of violence seem to be held compatible with the character of a gentleman ? The mere occurrence of such crimes as the late attack on Mr. Sumner would be nothing. Some of our own fast M.P.s would probably do the like if they were not restrained by fear of the certain consequences. But in America such acts are lauded by the whole of a great political party, if' perpetrated upon an opponent. The ready use of bowie-knife and revolver is characteristic of a large section of the citizens of the Union. Such a phenomenon throws us back into a state of society at once more lawless and more cowardly than any period of our own his- tory. We can recall no time when such outrages 813 are common in those parts of the United States, and especially, it would seem, at Washington, would have been tolerated in England. Evidently, among the lessons the Americans have forgotten, is the habit of controlling their passions, and of regarding a bully, a ruffian, and a brawler, with instinctive abhorrence.

What, again, can mark political blindness and degeneracy more strongly than a disregard of judicial integrity ? To obtain courts of justice free from all extraneous influence, and judges who would administer the law with firmness and independence, has been the continual object of English patriots ; and. to have succeeded in this object is one of the glories as it is one of the main safeguards of the English nation. But the American democracy, in its eagerness to have all the powers of the state -under its own imme- diate control, has struggled to undermine this safeguard of liberty ; and in the large majority of States the judges are elected only for a short time, and chosen by popular s . The om- nipotence of the majority.is the one principle navEch the pre- dominant class in the Union care : and when the principle is full developed, the most constunmate tyranny the world ever saw will be the result,

The facts to which we have thus briefly alluded,—the absorption of the best energies of American society in material pursuits, with a consequent enfeeblement of its purely intellectual faculties ; the practical exclusion of the class possessed of wealth and lei- sure from political influence or any sphere of noble activity ; the gradual predominance of the class composed largely of the pau- per emigrants of Europe; the depression of all powers in the state that could control even temporarily the will of the ma- jority for the time being ; the alarming and disgusting pre- valence of crimes of cowardly and ferocious violence,—are symptoms of unsoundness impossible to be overlooked. ?slight we not indeed assert, especially when we consider the in- creasing complexity and embarrassment of the Slave ques- tion, that of all the progress that the United States has made since it has been an independent nation, its progress towards anarchy has been the most astonishing ? Has the nation in fact solved by wisdom and courage any political difficulty ? Has it not rather, by the opposite qualities, though placed in circum- stances of peculiar advantage, fallen into a state in which friends

and foes alike look forward to a dissolution of the confederated States ? Comparing it with France or England, can it be said to

have shown anything like the same amount of political and social skill in meeting and, conquering the difficulties, such as they were, of its position? It behoves those Americans who love their country to think on these things. Of course such a view of the United States is a very partial one. The question is, whether it is true as far as it goes ; whether a worse state of culture exists in America today, in com- parison with that of Europe, than did at some earlier period ; whether the manners of the people are worse and their morals worse ; whether faction is stronger and patriotism weaker ; whe- ther a lower class—lower not alone in wealth and knowledge, but in moral tone, in self-restraint, in true co rules the policy and shapes the legislation of the country ; whether justice is not more uncertain and less cared for, right less respected and out- rage more familiar ; whether the postponement of self-interest to the interest of the community is not more rara—whether, in a word, while the country has been growing richer and more popu- lous, it has not lost much of the virtue that made it inde- pendent, and descended to a lower stage of organization ; whe- ther Americans as men are not worse men than their fathers and grandfathers. For our own parts, we have no doubt that if the evil is to be stemmed—if this great nation is to fulfil the ardent aspirations of its founders and of all lovers of liberty—the wealthy classes must gird them- selves up to take that part in political action, whatever be the difficulties they have to encounter, which the wealthy classes

amongst ourselves take and ever have taken. We have no no- tion. of the patriolism or virtue which will not put its hand to the wheel for fear of soiling its white gloves. A nobler task cannot

be put before the jeunesse clerk of any country than lies before the "upper ten. thousand" of the United States. Let them at least try to conquer the dragon before they sit down in despair and see their country sink lower and lower. As. a mere excite- ment, it would be better than the salons of Paris ; and surely, to turn the destinies of a great republic, to save it from itself, to make it a nation of men instead of a mob of demagogues and. their tools, would be glory and honour enough for the most arduous

efforts of self-sacrifice. If not, some Ciesar will know wilt* use to make of demagogues and tools, and faineants too, when the hour strikes.