16

DEMOCRACY TO BE THE LAW OF THE WORLD.

ism may live for a while in form;-in spirit they are dead. They can hope for no resurrection. The world is not wide enough any longer for monarchy, hierarchy, superstition, or oppression, of the bodies, souls, or spirits of men. The emancipation of men everywhere from the thraldom of man, is the enchanting watch-word of the last, and better half of the Nineteenth Century. The world has heard the shout of Freedom, and is straining on its fetters. It is saying to its oppressors : "The cup of bitterness you have so long pressed to our lips, we will drain no more forever."

IV.

NGLISH critics and statesmen must not grow restive or

ENGLISH

angry at us because we turn the tables, and speak with some freedom about them, and their social and political system. Again and again we say, we do not care for your form of gov ernment, nor do we claim that Republican forms are necessary to the existence or perpetuity of liberty. You call your form a monarchy, by which you mean an aristocracy, as strong and impregnable as you could make it. You care not much more for your Queen than we do, and many of you not half as much. But you use her as a foil, a pretext, a sham, behind which you. hide your unearned, often unjustly gotten, but always conve niently inherited wealth and titles. You are the monarchynot the royal family. -the masses starve.

You rule-not the Queen. You feast I know that the word American Democ

their crews to chains. And because the law of nations, more careful it seems of personal interests than the interests of humanity, has so shut these pirates out from the ports of every civilized country, that they cannot take in their prizes for condemnation in the rightful way of law, they must, therefore, condemn them by fire on the seas.

"

'Sir, as a great commercial people, holding and anxious to hold friendly relations with the government and people of Great Britain, we have a moral right to present these views to the government at Washington, and to ask the Secretary of State for the United States, through our diplomatic agents abroad, to lay these resolutions before the government and people of Europe."

THE MULTITUDE YET TO BE HEARD.

17

racy grates harshly on English ears, but that alters not the There is no throne, nor mitre, nor class that can withstand the tide of the age.

case.

And tell us!-should not the time come, sooner or later, when the many may have justice? When hunger among the neglected millions may drown the noise of pomp and splendor, and hush its revelry in a festival for the wronged, the outraged and the forgotten classes?

You know little of the sufferings that surround your own palaces. Through those noiselessly swinging doors the plaints of sorrow never pass. But those hearts that beat outside may be as warm as yours, and perhaps as divine music may be heard in heaven when those heart-strings are touched by angel fingers. Your own Dickens, whose suffering heroines you have read of, has taught you these lessons of sympathy long ago. If not, no word from this side of the Atlantic could reach your hearts.

But although I am writing with few of the restraints of arrangement which writers commonly impose upon their pens, I am admonished that I am encroaching unnecessarily upon ground which I have gone over more thoroughly in the body of the work. Therefore, at the risk of the imputation of egotism, I come to a brief account of the circumstances which led me to choose England as the theme of my first book.

V.

\HE friends of an author are entertained by incidents which

ings. The public care little about either, till the fame of the writer has become the property of the world. It will therefore be understood, that the plain account I give in these introductory pages of the history of this work, is intended chiefly for those who on both sides of the Atlantic, have, during long years, sent or given me friendly greetings.

My health had given way, and my physicians told me that nothing could save my life but a voyage to sea, and in May,

18

HOW 1 FIRST WROTE OF ENGLAND.

1840, I sailed for England, uncertain whether the voyage would cure or kill me. I had to leave my wife and child behind me, and I need not say, it was a painful separation and yet there was the relief of excitement about it-the inspiration of hope. Such a dash could not but change the current of my fortunes, for it seemed to me my last chance to live had come, and if there were a chance I should seize it,-if it were an ignis fatuus which lured me on, we would both disappear together.

There are periods when even Nature herself relies on extraordinary remedies, and Providence resorts to them so often in guiding our destinies, that uncommon exposures and bold designs often turn out to be the only means of success, or even of safety. All that books and teachers could do for a boy of my age had thus far been done. I had no idea of becoming an author, or trying to do anything to arrest the attention of mankind. To be well again I did not hope, but to die I could not think of. What men call fortune, I was born with. It had melted away. I did not dream of recovering it again, and as for fame, it had nothing to do with my thoughts. I know, in recollecting that period, that I only hoped I might return and live a few quiet years, pursuing my studies unmolested by poverty, garnering up my treasures in the bosom of my family, with a home which I knew would be a happy one, so long as beings who loved each other so well, were not separated by death. I remember very distinctly that, while I was looking back to catch the last sight of my cottage door on the morning I started for Europe, I felt, with more intensity than I had ever before felt a sentiment in my life, a desire to live to come back. It seemed to me that I could not, must not, die so young, so happy.

A

VI.

STORM swept our vessel to England in fifteen days. As I look back on it, that voyage is almost a blank. It would have been quite such but for my sufferings. I remember little but the terrible monotony of creaking rigging, hoarsc

FIRST SIGHT OF WALES.

19

orders, deck tramping and the angry surgings of the ocean. After making half the passage, the storm suddenly left us rocking among the waves. We now prepared ourselves for a long, tedious calm. Towards sunset the next day we saw a column of smoke rising up into the clear heavens on the western horizon, and we knew the "Great Western" was behind it. In a few hours she came up, and went sweeping by majestically over the now calm sea, leaving our sails to flap away interminable days without moving twenty miles in twenty-four hours.

So we all thought then, and wished we were on board the stcamer. A consciousness of the power of the steam engine on the ocean, I then felt for the first time. All the fleets of England, without steam, never could have impressed me as did that solitary steamer. But while we were lamenting our fate, and the sailors were beginning to get sulky, and the old captain was pacing the deck impatiently, whistling for a wind, far away to the north-west a cloud came rising which made the sea black as it came. First it struck the main-top-gallant-sails, and slowly we began to move once more through the waters. The ship soon lifted and shook herself and began to leap through the sea. The breeze freshened; we flew through the ocean. The next day a gale brought us where we saw the "Great Western" pitching and floundering heavily among the waves, while we were rushing by her shortly afterwards before the storm. We passed the steamer and saw no more of her, but we took with us her news to England, and stood on that island three hours before her passengers.

IT

VII.

T was a warm summer day when the glorious Welsh mountains rose up out of the ocean. The glass brought the farm houses, the quiet flocks, the green fields, close up to the eye. I cannot describe the feeling with which I gazed for the first time on that ancient land which had been the home of my fathers. I seemed to be returning to the graves of my ances

20

OUR ANTE-REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY.

tors, who had been long dead, and a new feeling came over me that I myself had been almost as long a wanderer. A great many associations which no one but an American whose ancestors came from England can ever feel, crowded on my mind, and the history of the Anglo-Saxon-Normans, their struggles and triumphs, came fresh to my memory. I began to find even before I landed what was only confirmed by experience, that I should enjoy England as she had been, more than England as she is. Up to the time of the embarkation of our fathers, England was their country, and our history was the history of Britain. The great writers of England, till the period of the Commonwealth, wrought and thought for my fathers as much as for the fathers of any living Englishman; and I have as many associations to bind me to them and their times, as though I had been born on that island.

A

VIII.

ROUND English history there is a charm which can be found in no other. The recent and the remote-the plain and the coscure-novelty springing up by the gray remains of antiquity-all the elements of the touching, and the beautiful, the gloomy, and the grand, mingle in the chronicles of our fatherland.

With us at home all is familiar and modern.* It is true we

*In illustration of this, I cite a few passages from the pen of Goldwin Smith, the noblest Englishman who has trod our soil during the present century.-(Atlantic Monthly, December, 1864.)

"But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject it—monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets-the cathedrals which enshrined our old religion-the illustrious hall in which the long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of our law-the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found their earliest home-the graves where our heroes and sages and poets sleep. . . . . . You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, and must owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France and Spain, as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung; from her

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