. VI HILDRETH'S UNITED STATES At the present day the United States present one of the most interesting and important political phenomena ever offered in the history of mankind. England has planted her colonies in New Holland, in New Zealand, in the East and the West Indies, at Cape Good Hope, and at Labrador; at Mauritius, Gibraltar, and in the Islands of the Pacific. She has forced an entrance into China; she longs to get firm footing in Borneo and Nicaragua. Wheresoever her children wander they carry the seed out of which British institutions are sure to grow; institutions, however, which never produce their like, but nobler and better on another soil. Omitting all mention of Ireland, America was the oldest of these colonies, the first to detach itself from the parent stem, and is perhaps the prophecy of what most of the others are destined to become. It must be a vigorous tribe of men which can hold so vast a portion of the earth while themselves are so few in numbers. Three hundred years ago, in the reign of Edward VI., England was a third-rate power in Europe. Her population was less than three millions, her exports were trifling, and consisted of the raw materials of her clumsy agriculture and her mineral treasures, which the Tyrians had traversed the ocean to purchase two thousand years before. Her soil could hardly raise a salad. Scotland was independent, Ireland not wholly subject to English rule, Wales had but lately been added to her realm. She was remarkable chiefly for the stormy seas which girt the isle, and the chalky cliffs along her shore, for the fogs that cover it, for the rudeness of her inhabitants and the tough valor of her soldiers. Now, in three hundred years, England contains some seventeen millions of inhabitants, Scotland and Ireland ten millions more. Russia, Austria, and France are the only nations in Europe that outnumber her in population. Turkey, with nine millions, and Spain, with twelve, are powerless beside her. Her ships are in all the oceans of the world, the sun never sets on her flag; her subjects capture the whale at Baffin's Bay, and the elephant in India; they sport at hunting lions in South Africa. Her navigators, with scientific hardihood, explore each corner of the Northern Sea, or locked in ice wait the slow hand of death, or the slower sun of an arctic summer. She has climes too cold for reindeer; climes too hot almost for the sugarcane and the pine-apple; the lean larch of Scotland, and the banyan-tree of Hindoostan, both grow in the same empire. Esquimaux, Gaboon, and Sanscrit are tongues subject to Britain. At least an eighth part of the men now living in the world owe allegiance to the queen of that little island. Her children came to America when the nation was in all the vigor of its most rapid growth. The progress of their descendants in population and in wealth has been wthout parallel. Two hundred and fifty years ago there was not an English settler in the United States; now the population is not far from two-and-twenty millions; two thirds of the people are of English origin. The increase of property has been more rapid than that of numbers. In fifty years Boston has multiplied her inhabitants nearly five-fold, and her property more than twenty-five fold in the same time. The increase of intelligence is very remarkable, and probably surpasses that of property. 66 The Americans are now trying a political experiment which has hitherto been looked on with great suspicion and even horror. Here is a democracy on a large scale, a church without a bishop, a state without a king; society (in the free states) without the theoretical distinction of patrician and plebian. What is more surprising, the experiment succeeds better than its most sanguine friends ever dared to hope. The evils which were apprehended have not yet befallen us. The "Red Republic," which hostile prophets foretold, has not come to pass; there are red " monarchies, enough of them, the other side of the world, born red; doomed, we fear, to die in that sad livery of woe; but in America the person of the citizen is still respected quite as much as in Austria and England; and nowhere in the world is property safer or so much honored, the lovers of liberty here are lovers of order as its condition. Even Mr. Carlyle, accustomed to speak of America with bitterness and contempt, and of the ballot-box with loathing and nausea, confesses to the success of the experiment so far as wealth and numbers are concerned. Indeed, it is a mater of rejoicing to warm-hearted men, that we have cotton to cover and corn to feed the thousands of exiles who yearly are driven by hunger from England, to seek a home or a grave on the soil of America. It is interesting to study the growth of the American people; to observe the progress of the idea on which the government rests, and the attempts to make the idea an institution. This is one of the few great nations which can trace its history back to certain beginnings; there is no fabulous period in our annuals, no mythical centuries when Οἱ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην, Μύρμηκες, ἄντρων ἐν μυχοῖς ἄνηλίοις. To be rightly appreciated, American history requires to be written by a democrat. A theocrat would condemn our institutions for lacking an established church with its privileged priesthood; an aristocrat, for the absence of conventional nobility. Military men might sneer at the smallness of the army and navy; and æsthetic men deplore the want of a splendid court, the lack of operatic and other spectacles in the large towns. The democrat looks for the substantial welfare of the people, and studies America with reference to that point. At present, America is not remarkable for her literature or her art; she has made respectable advances in science, but her industrial works and her political institutions are by far her most remarkable achievements hitherto. We are not sanguine enough to suppose that all the advantages of all the other forms of government are to be secured in this, but yet trust that the most valuable things will be preserved here. In due time, we doubt not, the higher results of civilization will appear, and we shall estimate the greatness of the nation not merely by its numbers, its cotton, its cattle, and its corn. But that is not first which is spiritual." First of all, the imperious wants of the body must be attended to, the woods are to be felled, the log-cabins built, the corn got into the ground, the wild beasts destroyed, the savages kept at peace. There must be many generations between the woodsman who erects the first shanty of logs, and the poet who sheds immortal beauty on logs and lumberers. Were there not ages between the wooden hut of Arcadian Pelasgos in Greece and the Parthenon? From mythical Cecrops to Aristophanes the steps are many, each a generation. The genius of liberty only asks two things — time and space. Space enough she has, all America is before her; time she takes possession of fast enough, only a second at once; and in the course of ages we think she will make her mark on the world. Up to this time the achievements of America are, taken as a whole, such as we need not blush at. Some things there were and are to be ashamed of - not of the whole. That dreadful blot of slavery remains yet, an Ireland in America; among the whites, on the one hand, causing the most shameful poltroonery which modern times can redden at, and on the other, calling forth heroism that seems almost enough to redeem the wickedness which has brought it to light. But, turning to that half of the nation free from direct personal contact with this sin of the state, forgetting for a moment the foolishness of "political sages," the cowardice of those leaders who never dare enact justice as a statute, but take the responsibility of making iniquity a law, and omitting the defalcation of men who forsake their habitual worship of a calf of gold, to bow down before a face of dough,2-there is certainly a gratifying spectacle. Here are some fifteen millions of free men trying the voluntary system in church and state, richer than any other people of the same numbers in the world, and with the aggregate wealth of the nation more equally distributed; a nation well fed, well |