GOLDWIN SMITH ON AMERICA.

21

read with pride and ambition of our fathers' struggles, when the story leads us through the toils of the Revolution back to the gloom of the green old forests and the bleak desolation of Plymouth landing: but there the story ceases in America, and we must cross the water for an account of our antecedent national existence. We then have an interest, and can betimes forget America as it slumbered on unwaked by the sea-gun of Columbus, while we retrace the story of our ancestors through preceding generations, to the time when the Roman conqueror first planted the eagle of Italy on the rocks of Britain, and returned to tell of a stormy island in the ocean, and of the rugged barbarians who dwelt in its glens and hunted on its cliffs.

you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that, having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World, became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and it is because you are Englishmen that English freedom, not French or Spanish despotism, is the law of this continent. From England you are sprung; and if the choice were given you among all the nations of the world, which would you rather choose for a mother? "England bore you, and bore you not without a mother's pangs. For the real hour of your birth was the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English history-the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who fill the scene. ... But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, primogeniture in the inheritance of land. . . . . . You had created the system of common schools, in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You had proclaimed, after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine of liberty of conscience, and released the Church from her long bondage to the State. All this you had achieved while you still were, and gloried in being, a colony of England.

. . . . .

.....

"In England the Revolution of the Seventeenth Century failed. It failed, at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a day with the party of religious freedom and of the

22

OUR PRE-COLUMBIAN HISTORY.

It is natural and proper that an American should read with stirring interest of the defeats, the struggles, the triumphs of Englishmen in those rude times, and think with the indignation of a free man and the love of a brother, on the sufferings of his kinsmen who dwell there now. The starving peasant and the pale operative are the sons of those who not long ago dwelt with our own fathers on the banks of the Tweed, the Thames and the Severn; and why should we not feel for them as for brothers?

Nurtured too in a Republic which had not only proved great in times which had tried the stability of older states, it seemed to me natural that I should carry with me into any land,

people. The nation had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots, overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the Restoration. ... English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort had failed.

"Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope. He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day reillumine the feudal darkness of the Old World.

"The Revolution failed in England. Yet in England the party of Cromwell and Milton still lives. It still lives: and in this great crisis of your fortunes, its heart turns to you. On your success ours depends. Now, as in the seventeenth century, the thread of our fate is twined with the thread of yours. An English Liberal comes here, not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own.

.....

"It is of want of sympathy, not of want of interest, that you have to complain. And the sympathy which has been withheld is not that of the whole nation, but that of certain classes, chiefly of the class against whose political

AN AMERICAN'S FEELINGS IN ENGLAND.

23

and through any clime, not only the principles in which I had been educated, but the pride of country, which will forever in the breasts of all true Americans, remain inseparable from their nature. Penetrated with the deepest belief, not only of the capacity of intelligent men (none others) for self-government, but that Republican institutions are the mightiest of all agencies to develope whatever is great in human nature, I thought the feeling might perhaps be stronger in me than among the men I was about to look on, and talk with.

It has always been a common, and rather an odious slur in England upon our countrymen who go abroad, that they carry their Republicanism with them. Although this is often meant

interest you are fighting, and to whom your victory brings eventual defeat. The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relation between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers. But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympa thize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.

The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have hearts above their crowns, and who in this great crisis of humanity forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself. . . . .

“The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are a standing menace to aristocracies, you are equally a standing menace to State Churches. A State Church rests upon the assumption that religion would fall, if it were not supported by the State. . . . . . The Englishmen of this day will not prevent those who come after them from being proud of England's grandest achievement, the sum of all her noblest victories-the foundation of this the great Commonwealth of the New World. And you will not prevent the hearts of your children's children from turning to the birth-place of their nation, the land of their history and of their early greatness, the land which holds the august monuments of your ancient race, the works of your illustrious fathers, and their graves."

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NATIONAL SENTIMENT OF ENGLISHMEN.

as a sarcasm, I have always taken it as a compliment; for in all nations respect has been felt for those men who have not forgotten the land of their birth, when they lost sight of their habitations. But if this feeling were a crime, Englishmen should never impute it to us; for in what part of the world has an Englishman ever been found who had not carried with him a good many testimonials that John Bull was his father! This hanteur that Englishmen never can get rid of, and perhaps never should, sometimes niakes them very disagreeable; but it is part and parcel of that national sentiment which, however disagreeable it may make some Englishmen, makes England very great.

These were the feelings with which I landed on the shores of England, went through her islands, and looked on society and government. The standard by which I judged government and the organization of society, was that which all men of sense will say is founded in justice. My premises were facts which I saw and learned for myself. My logic was that of the Declaration of Independence and my own heart, between which there was no collision. My conclusions were honestly drawn, and without pausing to think of the consequences, I published them to the world.

I

IX.

HAVE never entered the lists with critics or enemies to defend my book on England. Attacks without number were made on it (and in this country on its writer) on both sides of the Atlantic, but I never had a disposition to reply, and if I had felt like it I never should have found the time. My faith in authorship and fame is summed up in a word; if a book has not enough truth and vitality in itself to live, all the bolstering in the world will do no good. Who knows but the Spartans were right after all, in putting their sickly children out of the way. It seldom pays to raise them, especially literary bantlings. Time, the great regulator, will do justice at last to

MY CRITICS AND REVIEWERS.

25

25

every volume, and every man. It is a good maxim, that if you cannot put fire into your book, put your book into the fire. Whatever is necessary or useful to the progress of mankind, mankind will take care of. I am willing and glad to be tried in whatever I have written, or done, or may write, or do, hereafter, by that impartial tribunal. For I do not yet know of an instance, in which any contribution made in a proper spirit to the good of mankind has ever been allowed to die. As the stream of time moves on, it can and will bear on its bosom every thing that is buoyant enough to sustain itself. All else must sink, and ought to. Neither the partialities nor the prejudices of contemporaries can alter the decisions of the future. The judgments of men cannot be swayed for any great length of time by the petty strifes of contending rivals, or parties of the brief hour of struggle.

One of my most candid critics said, I could not have become qualified to write about England when I had passed hardly a year there. This struck me as a new sort of objection to urge against the correctness of a man's vision, because he spent so short a time in looking at the objects he described. There are men who might gaze, like Newton's dog, for years on Newton's stars without making much progress in the science of astronomy. Another of my English reviewers remarked, in speaking of these same critics, that "it would be more just to inquire whether what the writer saw and said was really so." I account for the fact that I did say some things about England that other visitors had not remarked, by giving an idea of the manner in which I economized my time. A residence of many years in Europe since that period, has only illustrated an observation I made when I first went abroad, that most travelers, especially Americans, are equally prodigal of their time and their money. I remember that when I reached England I was impressed with the feeling of how much my time would be worth there, if it were well spent. I have always found in my travels and sojournings, that a few hours, or even a few minutes, well spent at the right time, would