1819.

WALSH'S APPEAL.

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from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America." He began by stating in the preface that he had been driven to write the book in the hope that it might serve to refute the slanders incessantly heaped on his country by British writers. In common with such Americans as were well affected toward Great Britain he had hoped that the false and contumelious language of the better class of British critics would cease as time brought our true condition and character into strong relief. But his disappointment was complete, for no one who paid attention to the tenor of speeches and writings of late in Great Britain wherein reference was made to the United States, no one familiar with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews of the past year, could fail to see that no amount of evidence could silence the defamers. The desire to emigrate to America had spread among the rural population of England to an extent deemed hurtful, and the British politicians, thrown into paroxysms of jealousy, had enlisted the great reviews and journals in a common scheme of misrepresentation, to the end that the British farmer and artisan might be filled with horror of republican America, and the nations of the world with a distrust of the spirit of her Government. The Edinburgh and Quarterly had assailed us with a fierceness and rancor no provocation could excuse. The Whig journals had begun to rail in the same strain. The Opposition had joined with the ministerial party in a hue and cry against American ambition and cruelty, and credit had been given to the coarse inventions of English travellers who visited us for the express purpose of manufacturing libels, or had betaken themselves to this form of abuse after their return home as a profitable speculation.

Thus beset by a band of implacable and indefatigable foes who moved the public mind and directed the public affairs of Great Britain, we were in duty bound to combat them by every means in our power. A true showing of our character and principles having failed, nothing was left but retort in kind, for the British orators and writers never reproached America without putting England in glorious contrast. It was the excellent government, the liberty, the purity, and the comfort they had at home which, they would have us believe,

quickened their sensibility of the evils and abuses existing on our side of the water and embittered the expressions of their hate.

True to this purpose, Mr. Walsh undertook to show, by the use of British authorities of the highest order, historians, and legislators, records of Parliament, nay, by the very journals employed to pour British venom on the American people, that Great Britain was as miserable and wicked as any nation on earth. He reviewed the political mercantile jealousy of Great Britain from early colonial times, and quoted in evidence Evelyn, Hume, Postlethwayt, Sir Josiah Child, and Adam Smith. He reviewed the general character of the early colonists, and cited Burke, Chalmers, and the Quarterly Review in their defence. He set forth the difficulties that beset the colonists, the conquest of the wilderness, the struggles with the French and Indians, the sacrifices made for the good of the mother country, and her ungrateful return. He summed up the many titles of the United States to British respect; reminded his readers that slavery had been planted, fostered, and maintained in the colonies by Great Britain despite every effort to get rid of it; and showed from British sources that the treatment of the Catholics and the state of her prisons, jails, and paupers surpassed anything ever known in America; that the condition of her law courts, her chancery courts, her Parliament, was as bad as ours, while the fondness of the British people for prizefights and cock-mains exhibited a degree of brutality wanting in the American character.

To this defence the Edinburgh Review in time replied vigorously. Meanwhile, in the number of that periodical for the first quarter of 1820 was published the only one of the long series of attacks that has lived down to our day-the famous article by the Reverend Sydney Smith. The book he selected for review was Adam Seybert's "Statistical Annals of the United States," and the first part of the article was given up to a short epitome of its contents. He passed in review the statistics of population, trade and commerce, imports, tonnage and navigation, lands, the post-office, the revenue, the army, the navy, the national debt, and the cost of carrying on the Government; and having done this he exclaimed: "Such is the land of Jona

1820.

SYDNEY SMITH ON AMERICA.

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than, and thus has it been governed. In his honest endeavors to better his condition and in his manly purpose of resisting injury and insult we most cordially sympathize. Thus far we are friends and admirers of Jonathan. But he must not grow vain and ambitious, or allow himself to be dazzled by that galaxy of epithets by which his orators and newspaper scribblers endeavor to persuade their supporters that they are the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people upon earth. The effect of this is unspeakably ludicrous on this side of the Atlantic. The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people, but they have hitherto given no indications of genius and have made no approaches to the heroic either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset, indeed, from England, and should make it their chief boast for many generations to come that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shakespeare and Newton. Considering their numbers, indeed, and the favorable circumstances in which they have been placed, they have done marvellously little to assert the boast of such a descent, or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions. Their Franklins and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of the Revolution, were born and bred subjects of the King of Englandand not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And since the period of their separation a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmenlike studies of politics or political economy. Confining ourselves to our own country and to the period that has elapsed since they had an independent existence, we would ask: Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Horners, their Wilberforces? where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys? their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys, and Malthuses? their Porsons, Parrs, Burneys, or Blomfields? their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes? Their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or O'Neils?

their Wilkies, Lawrences, Chantreys? or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of the last thirty years, and blessed or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples? In so far as we know, there is no such parallel to be produced from the whole annals of this self-adulating race. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered, or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in the mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture? When these questions are fairly and favorably answered their laudatory epithets may be allowed."

In the following number of the Review was an article on Mr. Walsh's Appeal, and in this some attempt was made to atone for the bitterness of the previous attack and to soothe the animosity now assuming serious proportions.

It was, the reviewer admitted, a fact which required no proof even in America that there existed a party in England unfriendly to political liberty and decidedly hostile to all extension of popular rights. It was quite true that the party disliked America, and was apt enough to insult and decry her. Its adherents had never forgiven the success of her war for independence, her supposed rivalry in trade, and, above all, the tranquillity and happiness she enjoyed under a republican form of government. Such a spectacle of democratic prosperity was unspeakably mortifying to their high monarchical principles and easily imagined to be dangerous to their safety. Their first wish was that the States would quarrel among them

* The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, for January, 1820, to May, 1820, PP. 69-80.

1820.

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

331

selves and be thankful to be again received under British protection. That hope lost, they longed to find that republican institutions had made the Americans poor, turbulent, and depraved-incapable of civil wisdom, regardless of national honor, and as intractable to their own chosen rulers as they had been to their hereditary sovereign. "To those who are capable of such wishes and such expectations the happiness and good order of the United States, the wisdom and authority of its Government, and the unparalleled rapidity of their progress in wealth, population, and refinement, has been an ungrateful spectacle, and a subject of scurrility by the journals of this party at once disgusting and despicable. But need we tell the well-informed American that neither this party nor its journals can be allowed to stand for the people of England? that there is among that people another and a far more numerous party whose sentiments are opposed to the former, who are friends to America and to all that Americans most value in their character and institutions? who as Englishmen are proud to have great and glorious nations descend from them? who as freemen rejoice to see freedom spreading itself with giant steps over the fairest regions of the earth? and who know that when the drivelling advocates of hierarchy and legitimacy vent their sophistries with some shadow of plausibility on the Old World they can turn with decisive triumph to the unequivocal example of the New, and demonstrate the unspeakable advantages of free government by the unprecedented prosperity of America? Where then, we ask, is the justice or the policy of seeking to render a quarrel national when the cause of quarrel is only with an inconsiderable and declining party of its members; why labor to excite animosity against a whole people, the majority of whom must be your sincere friends, merely because some prejudiced or interested persons among them have disgusted the great body of their own countrymen by the senselessness and scurrility of their attacks on yours?" *

*Dispositions of England and America. The Edinburgh Review, May, 1820, pp. 395-431. A Review of Walsh's Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain.