Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

ON THE COMPLAINTS IN AMERICA AGAINST THE BRITISH PRESS.

It may not be known to all our readers, that several citizens of America, addicted to writing books, or, like ourselves, to the less ambitious composition of periodical articles, consider themselves to be in a state of declared and justifiable hostility with the British press, for what they call "the indiscriminate and virulent abuse," which it has lately heaped upon their country; and that in consequence some very angry appeals and remonstrances, and retaliative effusions, have been sent forth, to expose the extreme injustice and illiberality with which their unoffending republic has been treated on this calumniating side of the Atlantic. The vanity, or at least the views, of the writers to whom we allude, seems to have taken rather a singular turn. Heretofore a selfsufficient and irritable author's first ambition was to create an extraordinary bustle about himself; and he accordingly, as often as the fit was on him, loudly called upon the world to become a party in his personal squabbles and fantastic resentments; but the present race of paper-warriors of Boston and Philadelphia, magnanimously dismissing all consciousness of themselves, are displaying a more expanded fretfulness, as assertors of their country's reputation: and lest, we suppose, their sincerity should be questioned, they have entered into their patriotic animosities with all the blind and morbid zeal, and all the petty punctilious susceptibility of affront, that might have been expected from the most sensitive pretender to genius, while defending his own sacred claims to admiration and respect.

*

If the questions at issue were confined to the respective merits of Mr. Walsh, the great American appellant, against the calumnies of English writers, and our principal periodical reviews, which he so bitterly arraigns, we should leave the belligerents to fight out their differences in a course of harmless missile warfare across the Atlantic; but we can perceive from the tone of Mr. Walsh's book, and of his Boston reviewerf, that they have taken up the affair in a spirit far exceeding that of an ordinary literary quarrel. They have laboured hard to impress upon America, that she has become in this country the object of systematic hatred and contumely. Many obsolete questions have been re

An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America. Part first, containing an Historical Outline of their Merits and Wrongs as Colonies, and Strictures upon the Calumnies of British Writers. By Robert Walsh, junior. Second edition. Philadelphia, 1819, 8vo. pp. 512.

North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal. New series, No. 11 April 1820, Boston.

[blocks in formation]

vived for the mere purpose of exasperation, and discussed in a tone of the fiercest recrimination. We have hints, not of a very pacific kind, of the consequences that may accrue to England from her perverse insensibility to the merits of the United States. These topics and the inferences extorted from them, are throughout supported by considerable exaggeration, and occasionally, we regret to observe, either by direct falsehoods, or by suppressions that amount to falsehoods; so that were it not for our confidence in the better sense and information of the community which those productions are designed to inflame, we should expect to find every American that possessed a spark of national pride, burning to retaliate upon us, by acts of more substantial vengeance than verbal reprisals, for the insolent and unmanly sarcasms against his country that he is taught to believe has been of late the favourite occupation of English writers.

We profess to take a very anxious interest in all that relates to America. The Boston reviewer derides the notion of the endearing influence of consanguinity; but we feel it in all its force. We have not enough of his philosophy to forget, that the community which he is seeking to inflame against us, is principally composed of the children of British subjects-that our fathers were the countrymen of Washington and Franklin. We can never bring ourselves to consider the land of their birth as absolutely foreign ground. Many generations must pass away, and great vicissitudes in our mutual sentiments and relations mark the close of each, before a contest between America and England can be any thing else than what the late one was regarded, an unnatural civil war. We can not but feel too, that the character of the principles and institutions that most attach us to our own country, is vitally connected with the moral and political destiny of the United States; and that in spite of the violent separation, and of any changes of forms and titles that may have ensued, the Americans of future times will be regarded by the world as a race either of improved, or of degenerate Englishmen. Entertaining these sentiments, we cordially unite with those who deprecate all attempts to excite a hostile spirit in either country; and with this view shall proceed to point out a few instances of the extraordinary and unpardonable precipitation with which the above-mentioned writers have levelled their sweeping accusations against the English press; and, for brevity sake, shall take the review of Mr. Walsh's book in preference to the cumbrous original of which it contains an analysis.

With the generality of our readers it might indeed be sufficient to assert, and to appeal to their own knowledge of the fact, that in this country America is the object of no such sentiment as systematic hatred or contempt; but as the Boston critic has bold

ly cited some examples to the contrary, we may as well stop to examine how far his selection has been fortunate.

"It is well known (says he) that one of the most severe attacks ever made against this country in a respectable quarter, is the one contained in the 61st number of the Edinburgh Review;" and the writer (Mr. Sydney Smith) is classed among the "malignant contributors," to whom "abusive books of travels in America are entrusted," and who do not hesitate to gratify their feelings of personal animosity, and their jocular propensities, at the expense of truth and candour. We have this offensive libel before us, and we answer

It accuses the English cabinet of impertinence for treating the Americans with ridicule and contempt, and dwells upon the astonishing increase of their numbers and resources as a proof that England and the other powers of the old world must soon be compelled to respect them. It praises the cheapness of the American establishments. It compares the spirit of the American and English governments in relation to the liberty of the subject, and gives the preference to the former.

It praises the simple costume of the American judges and lawyers, and is unsparing in its ridicule of the "calorific wigs" of our Ellenboroughs and Eldons. It commemorates the cheapness and purity of the administration of justice in America, and exposes the expense and delays of the English Court of Chancery.

The reverend and "malignant contributor" extracts the details of Mr. Hall's visit to Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Fearon's to Mr. Adams, both tending to increase our admiration of those respectable characters.

He agrees with Mr. Fearon that the indolence of the American character is a proof of the prosperity of the country.-He gratifies his "personal animosity" by expressing his "real pleasure" in citing Mr. Bradbury's attestations to their independence and hospitality, and Mr. Hall's to the good sense and courtesy prevailing in their social circles to their extraordinary liberality to strangers in pecuniary transactions--and to "the gallantry, high feeling, and humanity of the American troops;" and finally, the libeller vents some encomiums upon the religious habits of the American people, and the great respectability of their clergy.

Here is praise enough, one should think, for national vanity of an ordinary appetite; but Mr. Smith has had the arrogance to glance at two little facts, upon the first of which the Boston critic seems particularly sore-the scantiness of their native literature-and the institution of slavery, the greatest curse and stain upon a civilized community; and this foul proceeding on the part of the reverend reviewer has cancelled all the merit of his previous panegyric.

We had intended to have taken one of the papers in another periodical journal which has proved equally offensive on the other side of the Atlantic, and to have given a similar summary of its contents; but the specimen we have selected of an article pre-eminently stigmatized for its injustice and illiberality, will be sufficient to satisfy every rational Englishman or American, that very little dependence is to be placed on those directors of public opinion in the latter country, who assert that it has been the subject of "indiscriminate and virulent abuse" in this.

The North American Review, in a long episode, arraigns the English writers and politicians (including Mr. Bentham and Lord Grey) for their profound ignorance of some important peculiarities in the government of the United States. Assuredly, we may with equal truth retort the accusation, and express our astonishment that Mr. Walsh, and the conductor of the Boston Review, Mr. Everett, both of whom passed some years in England, should have returned to their own country, so singularly unacquainted with the most notorious characteristics of our constitution, and with the consequences as manifested in the political sentiments of our people. Did they never hear, that our frame of government was compounded of monarchical and republican elements? that these elements were in a state of ceaseless conflict? that every Englishman, who arrives, or thinks he has arrived, at the age of discretion, makes it a point to extol the one, and decry the other, according as his education, or temperament, or interests throw him into the ranks of either of our great contending parties? Are they not aware that in this fierce intestine war of opinion, which has been now for a couple of centuries raging among us, the highest personages of the land on the one side, and the most sacred rights of the people on the other, are daily assailed with the most virulent abuse and ridicule? During their residence in England, did Messrs. Walsh and Everett never throw their eyes over the columns of one of our ranting patriots, or over the anti-jacobinical effusions of a ministerial declaimer? Did they never pass by one of our caricature-shops, where kings and queens, ministers and oppositionists, judges and bishops, and every man, woman, and child, who has the good fortune to be of sufficient celebrity for the purpose, are regularly gibbetted for the entertainment of a people, who consider one of their most glorious privileges to be that of laughing at their superiors? Did these enlightened observers of British manners never discover that it is one of the customs of our country to tolerate all this, and that the most prominent objects of those attacks are, for the most part, among the first to enter into the spirit of the joke against themselves?

And if the United States of America now and then happen to come in for a share of the wit or scurrility that is going on, do they not perceive that it is in reality a tribute to her importance, and that she may safely leave her quarrel in the hands of the admirers of republics among us, who will not fail in due season to retaliate with equal venom, if not equal wit, upon some of the popular royal butts of the day-the Bourbons, or the Holy Alliance, or the august representative of what is most monarchical in the eyes of men, the Emperor of all the Russias. Surely a moment's reflection might have shown them that on such occasions silence and good-humour are the only effectual weapons of defence, and that no wise and sober American should feel serious alarm for the character and dignity of his nation, even though a Scotch critic should make unreasonably light of Mr. Joel Barlow's inspirations, or because Mr. Sydney Smith's pen, in an hour of thoughtless gaiety, addressed some words of friendly admonition to the United States of America, under the homely appellation of "Jonathan." Yet such are among the provocations that have called forth Mr. Walsh, as the protagonist of his calumniated " country," that he may "if possible arrest the war, which is waged without stint or intermission upon its national reputation."

However irrational this extraordinary sensitiveness may be, we suspect that the secret cause of it may be easily discovered.

We have had occasion to mingle pretty freely with American travellers in this and other countries of Europe, and to study their sentiments and manners with some share of attention. Among them we found several who might be compared with the best specimens of the best classes of any community that can be named-accomplished gentlemen and scholars, who had crossed the seas for the honourable purpose of enlarging their views, and travelling down their prejudices, and whose conversation afforded infinite stores of interesting information and manly speculation. They were distinguished by manners happily composed of frankness and refinement, by great ardour in the pursuit of practical knowledge, and by a deep but temperate preference for the institutions of their native country. The greater number, if not all of them, have returned to America, where their rank and acquirements predestine them to share in the conduct of public affairs, and where we sincerely trust, that their better influence will prove a corrective to the baneful doctrines of such men as Mr. Walsh and his Boston coadjutor. But others, and we must add, the large majority, were persons of a very different stamp. They were vulgar, vain, and boisterous; their acquirements were common-place and limited. Their conversation was made up of violent declamations against slavery (Americè monarchy) and as loud assertions of the superiority of America over

« ZurückWeiter »