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 bave 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, sho 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.

Garrison has sustained the rights of the slave at the peril of his life; had he possessed the power, slavery would not now exist. But in the Carolinas where no one will serve, how can one get on without slaves? Bells are banished, their use being humiliating. The servants or rather the helps, as there are no servants, let you wait for hours.

This chapter is, as we have already said, abundant in original adventures. A lady expected some friends to supper, they came late, and the dishes were placed in one of those portable stoves intended to preserve the heat and kept in the cating room. When the guests entered, they saw a help sitting at table and demolishing a fine bird. When reproached the answer was, "Well, nobody came, and everything was getting cold." "Another lackey," says Miss Martineau, "received orders from his mistress to say and do nothing, but to see that every guest had sugar and milk for their tea. For two hours he performed this service well and then opened the door and went out. But remorse seized him and half opening the door he cried to a company occupying a sofa, Say you have you got sugar enough?'”

Nor is it only in this article that destruction of class is felt. There, as in France, commerce and production lower cach other. The buyers are no longer a class ; consumers are on the same footing with furnishers; makers and sellers are on the same level. They manufacture quick and well enough to secure a sale, at race-course speed, and hence results a general mediocrity of products.

Germans, Spaniards, Irish, Scottish, French, fall at once into the Anglo-Saxon and Dutch mass, the ancient basis of the colony, and produce a curious result; the hostile colors aro neutralized aud lost, as the fusion of all the colors on a painter's palette results in a grey and nameless tint.

Yet there are terrible dramas there. Near the Rocky

Mountains, and in parts of the South, the life of the settlers is frightfully wild, There law is silent or powerless; in those solitudes take place the most horrible and incredible things. We were much amased in Europe at the Hindoo association of Thugs and Phansigars, who strangled travellers so scientifically, and formed a religious sect. The little volume published in Boston, called the Life and Confessions of Murel, prove that the same sort of association, submitted to more refined laws (as was proper for the children of the old European civilization) can exist in the United States. There was the same concord of evil for money, the same cupidity, the same secret and cautious regularity in the execution of murders. It is only necessary to read the trials in the public papers to form an idea of these horrors. It is generally on the banks of the Mississippi that they occur; muddy and blood-stained stream, whose waters, says an American, has engulfed more corpses, and whose banks have concealed more crime than we will ever know. A clever writer could make much of the

life of Murel or of

Mike; or even of the newspaper recitations of the loss of the Home or the Moselle.

Still, in all this, the ancient nationalities may be traced, the enterprising energy and patient audacity of the Saxon, the indomitable temerity of the Norman, the exaggerated cockneyism and vulgarity of Wapping, the calm sterility and cipher-egotism of Leadenhall Street, the adventurous smartness of the blackleg, the outward and formal rigor of the Puritan.. The Old English nationality has not yet had the time to get quiet and refined, nor to transform itself thoroughly; but this will take place, and soon one will no longer recognise its source. Every day furthers the metamorphosis, and few sce what is going on under their very eyes.

Precisely as in 1666, the germs of a republio filled America without attracting notice; so now a colossal Europe is being

formed there, and no one sees it. What will become of the Puritan civilization submitted to a mathematical education? It is the first time that the experiment has been made, and that philanthropy, the arts, religion herself, are formulised by cube-roots and cosines. Captain Hall says that the pupils of. the Military School at West Point lose their names and are numbered. How will it work, this reduction of men to figures? We will know hereafter. Marryatt gives another illustration of this reign of figures, two young women speaking, in a stage-coach, about their new bonnets, do so mathematically.

Such a social organization is not favorable to Nterature, and does not need it. This nation of laborious auts, of busy bees, of human beings forever at work, who do not take time to cat, who despise leisure, who abhor repose, is in the most detestable position for the cultivation of art and poesy. Yet there are political orators, Webster, Clay, Everett, Cass :-historians, as Bancroft, Schoolcraft, Butler, Carey, Pitkins, Prescott, Sparks-miscellaneous writers as Neal, Stevens, Child, Leslie, Sedgewick, Sanderson, Willis, Hall, Fay, Washington Irving, Herman Melville;-novelists, Paulding, Ingrahamn, Kennedy, Bird;-poets, Drake, Longfellow, Bryant, Sigourney, Hallock; -legists, Kent, Story, Hall-but above all that courageous man, who has revealed to the Americans their dauger, who has pointed out the reefs upon which their prosperity may sutler shipwreck, FENNIMORE COOPER.

It is strange that the government of masses do not develop mental liberty; it strangles it and for a mathematical reason. When all have rights over us, he who detaches himself from the mass offends all. You cannot unite originality with equality. Elegance, exactitude, magniloquence, affectation may get along with such a position, but humor and liberty, never,

They are trying now in America that stimulating and caustic literature which still exists in France. Our dramatic

representations, have not yet attained to the exciting intensity of a recent drama' called "The Infernal Regions." The author does not bother himself about the dialogue: but his piece is filled with the damned and the hanged; with cauldrons, tortures, skinnings, and flames, howlings, gnashing of teeth; a darkness illumined by streaks of lurid light, seas of blood, plaintive wails, unfortunates plunged in boiling pitch, and devils tearing off with their pincers, long shreds of human flesh. All this replaces, with advantage, Eschylus and Sophocles, Shakspeare and Corneille.