suaded that you have lied. For ten minutes he bites the head of his cane, and then addressing it, rather than you,

says,

"The Americans are reckoned to be a people who go ahead.'

"You cannot help saying, interrogatively, "Yes?' and he answers very vigorously,

"Yes.""

These familiar circumstances show the true leanings of a nation. This nation is still too young, and already too powerful, too incomplete, yet too rich, to escape the susceptibility, weakness, and morbid sensitiveness and follies of the parvenu. All travellers find in the Americans a suffering and nervous sensitiveness which hides the best part of the national character. Seeing only the timid side, the English are pitiless; they note the defects, and forget that these are effaced by good qualities.

Upon this Miss Martineau has endless dissertations, Basil Hall chatters, Dickens jokes, and Marryatt flies into a passion. We do not much heed an author's passion: nevertheless that is the moving power, the wind that drives the bark. English rancor is blind with reference to America. They pick out and present before us the worst points of view: but what cannot be said of a country which contains everything! which is made up of all materials, is always changing, always getting larger, has no natural limits save the two oceans, does not itself know what it is, what it can, what it should, or what it will be; which has neither Past nor Present, but only a boundless Future. Paint in divers colors, the squatters who struggle with the desert; the fanatics who howl in the forests; the travelling traders, and all these isolated pictures will be inexact. United and grouped, they will give a just idea of the American Democracy, a gigantic embryo, a

heap of wandering particles, which will one day form one colossal mass.

It would appear that the climate of North America, aids in making the sons of the Puritans somewhat like the aboriginal inhabitants of the forest. The predilection for vast images, and grand metaphors; the love of a wandering life, coldness in the relation between the two sexes, coldness mingled with dignity, appear to be characteristics borrowed from the Indian; whether the temperature have modified the AngloSaxon race, or that the example of the red-skins has been contagious. In the most remarkable novels of Cooper, the savage and the squatter resemble each other almost to identity.

The ancient sap of the race mingles with the action of a a new climate, with the philosophy of the 18th century, with the democratic spirit, and finally with the puritan spirit, the traces of which are, as we have said above, not yet effaced. Several scenes reported by Marryatt and Dickens recall the times of Cromwell, you fancy yourself to be reading a page of Butler or of Scott. Take this sketch from Dickens.

"The only preacher I heard in Boston was Mr. Taylor, who addresses himself peculiarly to seamen, and who was once a mariner himself. I found his chapel down among the shipping, in one of the narrow, old, water-side streets, with a gay blue flag waving freely from its roof. Sometimes, when much excited with his subject, he had an odd way-compounded of John Bunyan and Balfour of Burley—of taking his great quarto Bible under his arm and pacing up and down the pulpit with it; looking steadily down, meantime into midst of the congregation. Thus, when he applied his text to this first assemblage of his hearers, and pictured the wonder of the church at their presumption in forming a congregation among themselves, he stopped short with his Bible under his arm in

the manner I have described, and pursued his discourse after this manner:

"Who are these-who are they-who are these fellows? where do they come from? where are they going to? Come from! What's the answer?' leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with his right hand: 'From below!' starting back again, and looking at the sailors before him: 'From below, my brethren. From under the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one. That's where you came from!' a walk up and down the pulpit: and where are you going'-stopping abruptly, 'where are you going? Aloft !'-very softly, and pointing upward: Aloft !'louder aloft !'-louder still: That's where you are going —with a fair wind-all taught and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory, where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' Another walk: 'That's where you're going to, my friends. That's it. That's the place. That's the port. That's the haven. It's a blessed harbor-still water there, in all changes of the winds and tides; no driving ashore upon the rocks, or slipping your cables and running out to sea, there. Peace-peace-peace-all peace!'-Another walk, and patting the Bible under his left arm.'".

In so vast a country there is room for all, Past and Present; English eccentricities, French novelties, and specimens of antiquated manners are all at their ease there. The increase of population is in proportion to the immensity of the land. The single city of Rochester which in 1815 counted 331 inhabitants now counts 15,000. They have more than tripled in three years; and eleven years have been enough to

multiply its population by twenty five. When one thinks that these things are going on all over America without being noticed, one recognizes the force of this infant, giant society. It goes so rapidly and so powerfully that we cannot demand elegant attitudes from it.

It has its puerilities, and buries our Europe before she is dead. It has villages called Paris, and towns called Rome. There is something comic about this renewing of the Old World, this dressing of it in masquerade clothes. Syracuse after Orleans, Chartres and Memphis, Canton and Venice. The old globe is mirrored here, upon this young unknown hemisphere. You cross Troy to get to Pontoise; thence you go to Mondaga, or Tchecktawasaga; you find yourself in Corinth, and from thence you go to Madrid, passing on your road Thebes, Tripoli, Schenectady, Tomkins, Babylon, London, Sullivan, and Naples. What is remarkable is the progress of all these places. Where Captain Basil Hall saw two shops and a church, Hamilton found a town; three years afterward, Miss Martineau saw here a small city, and two years later Charles Dickens admires its hotels, its theatre, its promenade, its port, its quai.

"Tis a miraculous rapidity of growth. Everything grows like mushroons. How then can you ask a finished society from a people in so great a hurry! A nation so soon successful (parvenue), has the faults of parvenues, susceptibility, ostentation, vanity, love of rule, anxiety about public opinion. One is not astonished, one does not try to enjoy perfect pleasure in a house which is being built, where the hammer is sounding, where flames sparkle and cyclops toil regardless of aught else but their toil. Why impute, to them, as a crime, the intense activity which is both their strength and their great

ness.

SECTION VI.

SUPERSTITIOUS REGARD FOR PUBLIC OPINION-THE AMERICAN

PRESS AND ITS EXCESSES-HELPS.

Public opinion, and the press, its minister and slave, have made extraordinary ravages and accomplished incredible usurpation in the United States. It appears that every people have need of a tyrant, and that the laws of humanity require it to submit to power, as the law of power seems to require abuse. The Americans, professors of democratic principles, have created a power of opinion to which they submit. This power is abused. As the nation chooses it, she also encourages it. Armed with a journal, that is, with a battery of opinion, you can pillage and assassinate with impunity. For instance, the horrible case of the murderer Colt, who was several times reprieved by journal-influence and at last committed suicide.

Some citizens of the States who have had the courage to tell the truth have incurred real danger. "Where," cries an American, "shall the free thinker take refuge? To speak unreservedly of any country, must we establish a press in some desert island? or beside the Pole? The facility and rapidity of communication seem to have repressed rather than encouraged the independence of ideas, and soon one will recognize with astonishment that typography, that second Word of humanity, has been, like speech, given but to conceal thought." The independent thinkers who have dared to write thus, true heroes of moral courage Clay, Webster, Channing, Cooper, and Garrison, should be cited with honor.