BOOKS.
MR. GOLDWIN SMITH ON THE UNITED STATES.* THERE are many people in this country who take up a new work by Mr. Goldwin Smith with a certain prejudice. His pessimism about England's condition and future, and his ad- miration for the United States, however well founded and however wholesome they may be for a people which stands in need of " discipline," undoubtedly do not conciliate the majority of English readers ; while the sympathies of neither political party are wholly with a writer who is in the habit of exposing the sophistries of Gladstonian Home-rulers, and dissecting the aspirations of Imperial Federationists with the same contemptuous force. Holding, as we have consistently done, that logic and statesmanship alike are on the side of those who champion constitutional union with Ireland, and repudiate the same connection with distant Colonies, and that the cause of union, rightly understood, has a clear- sighted defender in Mr. Goldwin Smith, we may yet con- fess to a feeling that his method of conducting the colonial controversy has not always been calculated to win the sym- pathetic assent of Englishmen. Many indeed are the faults with which as a nation we may justly accuse ourselves, and chiefly of a sort of lethargic indifference to vital Imperial questions, and of a too great confidence in our fancied strength ; but the history of the last fifty years must surely acquit us of the charge of arrogance or selfish conduct towards the larger self-governing Colonies. The connection has, on the whole, been highly creditable to the mother-country and profitable to the Colonies; and to harp overmuch on past mistakes does not seem to us to be the best way to bring about the only union which can be hoped for, or to ensure its con- tinuance where it exists,—namely, the more or less senti- mental union founded upon community of race language and history. However this may be, any one who turns to the present volume with feelings such as we have alluded to, will be agreeably disappointed if he expects to find anything but the fairest treatment of the mother-country. The writer, indeed, almost goes out of his way to place the conduct of Great Britain in the most favourable light, and in this re- spect, as well as in his outspoken criticisms, he seems to have had in view an American no less than an English public.
"No conflict in history," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "has made more noise than the Revolutionary War. It set flowing on every Fourth of July a copious stream of panegyrical rhetoric which has only just begun to subside. Everything connected with it has been the object of a fond exaggeration. Skirmishes have been magnified into battles, and every leader has been exalted into a hero. Yet the action, and with one grand exception, the actors were less than heroic, the ultimate conclusion was foregone, and the victory after all was due, not to native valour, but to foreign aid."
We are not disposed to quarrel with this estimate, though the momentous character of this war to England, both in her- self and in her relation to Ireland, to America, to Canada, and to France, raise it far above the rank which these words would apparently assign to it. Separation, however—and too pro- bably angry separation--'-Mr. Goldwin Smith looks upon as having been well-nigh inevitable, for the conception of colonial relations which placed the whole burden of Empire upon the mother-country and allowed the Colonies to lay protective duties on her goods had not dawned upon the minds of any of her statesmen or thinkers ; and Dean Tucker's advice to bid the Colonies begone, if they persisted in their refusal to contribute to the defence of the Empire, was accept- able on neither side. We will not follow Mr. Smith in his eloquent apportionment of the blame for the strife, owing to which the two great families of our race were estranged per- haps for ever, beyond remarking that he does not acquit the agitators and preachers of Boston, who did so much to push the quarrel to extremity, and that he recognises the natural sentiment of Empire which animated British minds and filled the heart of the " arbitrary and bigoted King."
De Tocqueville long ago noted how universal was merit among the governed, and how little common among the rulers, and deplored the progressive decline in the character of American statesmanship,—a fact which Mr. Goldwin Smith's description of successive Presidents, and of those, it may be added, who failed to become Presidents, confirms, and which • TOo Unitrd States an Outline of Political History, 149f 1871. By Goldwin Smith. D.O.L. Landfill and New York : Macmillan and Co. 183i1. he attributes, like De Tocqueville, to the influence of jealousy in democracies. Nothing, by the way, in this book is more remarkable than the character-sketches with which it abounds ; short and pointed, but comprehensive and picturesque, they always strike the dominating note. There is Alexander Hamilton, first in ability of American statesmen, but never popular; Patrick Henry, slaveholder and patriot orator ; Calhoun, "idol and guiding-star of the slaveowning aristocracy," buried at Charleston with the single word, " Calhoun "—a sufficient monument of his greatness—on the great slab of marble which covered his tomb ; Webster, "who as an orator of reason has no superior—if he has an equal—in the English language; " Clay, " a paragon of the personal fascination now called magnetism," who, however, as a cynical critic said, could get more men to listen to him, and fewer to vote for him, than any other man in the Union. Nor can we omit the phrase about our own Burke, "of all rhetoricians the most philosophic who, though he goes deep into everything, seldom goes to the bottom;" nor the note on Fox, " a debauchee in polities as in private life, whose reckless violence and revolting displays of sympathy with the Americans, even when they bad France for an ally, could only confirm the obstinacy of the King and his Ministers, and identify their cause in the eyes of the nation with that of the honour of the country."
More brilliant than any is the account of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest figure of the early days of the Republic after Washington, and before him in the vast impression he made on the character of his people. " Their political ideas and hopes, their notions about their own destiny and the part which they are to play in the " drama of humanity, have been his." " Le plus puissant ap6tre qu'ait jamais eu la d6mo- cratie," as De Tocqueville describes him, this enigmatic leader remains in America a popular idol. "Intently he listened for the voice of the popular will, and surely he caught its every whisper," and his strength lay in his unbounded faith in the people and in the success of the great American ex- periment in democracy. His accession marks the fall of the Federalist Party,—the party of " strong government and English leanings."
"Every vestige of the half-monarchical State which Washington had retained was now banished from the President's mansion and life. No more coaches-and-six, no more Court-dross, no more lev6es. Although Jefferson did not, as legend says, ride to his inaugura- tion and tie his horse to a fence, he was inaugurated with as little ceremony as possible. He received an Ambassador in slippers
down at heel Yet, with all his outward simplicity, the Virginian magnate and man of letters, though he might be a Republican, could not in himself be a true embodiment of democracy. He was the friend of the people, but not one of them. From him to the rough warrior of Tennessee, the hard cider- drinking pioneer of Ohio, and the rail•splittor of Illinois, there was still a long road to be travelled."
The next great landmark in the onward progress of democracy is the accession of one of the five soldier Presidents, Andrew Jackson, in 1827. His predecessor, John Quincy Adams, had been the last President chosen for merit, instead of " availability," and "he was about the last whose only rule was not party but the public service." Bat he was unoon- ciliatory,—would not go on the stump, or practise the arts of demagogism. Jackson's entry into Washington was likened to the inundation of Rome by the Northern barbarians. A ruthless proscription inaugurated the spoils system, and Webster in a powerful oration gave voice to the alarm felt by good citizens. If any man in such a community could medi- tate usurpation, he would act, says our author, as Jackson acted :— "He would stretch his power under pretence of asserting popular right ; he would give himself out as the embodiment of the popular will; ho would degrade Constitutional Assemblies and the Judiciary ; he would ostentatiously appeal from their judg- ment to that of the people ; he would corrupt the public press ; and he would stir up the hatred of the poor against the rich," An ominous echo of much that is being said in England now ! In America, however, then as now, there are many things more important than politics, and in these the country was making giant strides, and in the settlement and develop- ment of vast territories, in industrial expansion and invention, the best energies of the nation were more worthily absorbed.
Mr. Goldwin Smith's name is identified with the movement for the absorption of Canada in the United States, and in the preface to this book he looks forward to the voluntary reunion of the American branches of the race within the pale of the American Commonwealth. While admitting the force of the geographical argument in favour of commercial union which he so ably stated in his work on Canada, we doubt whether his strenuous advocacy of political union has been very well-advised from his own point of view. It has undoubtedly called forth a display of anti-American feeling ; political leaders in Canada seem united in their loyalty to the Mother-country, and recent events there seem to show that he has underrated both the will and the power of Canadians to remain independent of their great neighbour. In the present work he brings out so clearly the historical reason of the original separation, that it is curious that he should fail to estimate at its proper value the spirit which still keeps the two nationalities apart. The close of the Revolutionary War was marked by an explosion of violence in the States against the large minority who remained faithful to Great Britain. Execu- tions, proscriptions, and confiscations drove them from the new Republic, and the Loyalists took refuge in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Upper Canada; so that if, as Mr. Smith says, a power hostile to the Republic should ever be formed under European influence in the north of the Continent, the Ameri- cans will owe it to their ancestors who refused amnesty to the vanquished in civil strife. Space fails us to touch on the history of slavery, of the great struggle, and of the reconstruction of the Union, with which this volume closes ; but nothing can be better than the rapid and admirably clear summary of events and the statesmanlike comments of the pages which deal with this portion of the history. In all the gifts of the historian, indeed, Mr. Goldwin Smith is pre-eminent, and in none of his too few and fragmentary writings have they been more brilliantly displayed than in this. He promises us a companion volume, treating of the recent history'of parties and the questions of the present day ; and when this is com- pleted, ignorance of the main outlines of the constitutional and political history of the United States will be inexcusable in an Englishman who has Maine, Bryce, and Goldwin Smith to instruct him. It is infinitely to be desired that American writers of equal influence would undertake to place before their countrymen in the same philosophic and sympathetic spirit the glorious history of Great Britain,—their heritage as it is our own. It is impossible to believe that a better understanding would not be the result, or that the rancour of politicians competing for an Irish vote would then much longer be allowed to dictate the relations between the two greatest free nations upon earth. If such a change could come about, bow different, to quote words used by Mr. Gold- win Smith in a similar connection, "might be the history of our race,—perhaps to the end of time !"
Previous page
