FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[CT]Alotis generally from 22 to 25 feet front, and from 80 to 100 deep.[CU]The causes of religious changes are various. It is not rare to see Americans, on becoming rich, abandon their former sect for Episcopalianism, for instance, which is the most fashionable. The change, however, from one sect to another is less considerable than is supposed in Catholic countries; for the different Protestant sects differ less from each other, than a Jansenist from a Molinist, or a Jesuit from a Gallican. But we must except from this remark the Anglican church, which has a peculiar character, discipline, and liturgy, and the two not very numerous sects of Unitarians, who deny the divinity of Christ, and Universalists, who reject the doctrine of reprobation.[CV]The American houses are low and slight; the walls are generally only a brick and a half, sometimes only one in thickness; when, therefore, the course of the street is changed, as is often the case in New York, they are set forward or back with little difficulty, and they are often even raised bodily. In the country, the houses are mostly of wood, and are often transported a considerable distance on wheels. Between Albany and Troy, I was stopped on the road by a house of more than forty feet front, which was travelling in this manner.[CW]This word is not used here; that of employers is substituted for it.[CX]The citizens of Pottsville have put an end to these outrages, by repairing with a sheriff's mandate to the spot where the boatmen were assembled, and seizing the ringleaders, whom they conducted to prison. This courage of simple citizens, who in time of need convert themselves into an armed force, is one of the surest guarantees of American liberty; but it is relaxing in the cities.[CY]In most of the provinces in France servants' wages are from 12 to 15 dollars a year; here they are from 10 to 12 dollars a month, and one servant in France does the work of two in this country.

[CT]Alotis generally from 22 to 25 feet front, and from 80 to 100 deep.

[CU]The causes of religious changes are various. It is not rare to see Americans, on becoming rich, abandon their former sect for Episcopalianism, for instance, which is the most fashionable. The change, however, from one sect to another is less considerable than is supposed in Catholic countries; for the different Protestant sects differ less from each other, than a Jansenist from a Molinist, or a Jesuit from a Gallican. But we must except from this remark the Anglican church, which has a peculiar character, discipline, and liturgy, and the two not very numerous sects of Unitarians, who deny the divinity of Christ, and Universalists, who reject the doctrine of reprobation.

[CV]The American houses are low and slight; the walls are generally only a brick and a half, sometimes only one in thickness; when, therefore, the course of the street is changed, as is often the case in New York, they are set forward or back with little difficulty, and they are often even raised bodily. In the country, the houses are mostly of wood, and are often transported a considerable distance on wheels. Between Albany and Troy, I was stopped on the road by a house of more than forty feet front, which was travelling in this manner.

[CW]This word is not used here; that of employers is substituted for it.

[CX]The citizens of Pottsville have put an end to these outrages, by repairing with a sheriff's mandate to the spot where the boatmen were assembled, and seizing the ringleaders, whom they conducted to prison. This courage of simple citizens, who in time of need convert themselves into an armed force, is one of the surest guarantees of American liberty; but it is relaxing in the cities.

[CY]In most of the provinces in France servants' wages are from 12 to 15 dollars a year; here they are from 10 to 12 dollars a month, and one servant in France does the work of two in this country.

BEDFORD SPRINGS.

Bedford Springs, (Pa.) Aug. 7, 1835.

Here I am at Bedford, one of the American watering-places; it is hardly three days since I arrived, and I am already in haste to quit it. The Americans, and, still more especially, the American women, must be desperately listless at home, to be willing to exchange its quiet comfort for the stupid bustle, and dull wretchedness of such a residence. It would seem that in a country truly democratic, as is the case here in the Northern States, nothing like our watering-places can exist; and you will see that in proportion as Europe grows democratic, if such is its destiny, your delightful summer resorts will lose their charm. Man is naturally exclusive; there are few pleasures, which do not cease to be such, the moment they become accessible to all, and for that reason only. At Saratoga or at Bedford, the American soon grows weary, because he sees that there are twenty thousand heads of families in Philadelphia and New York, who can, as well as he, if the notion seizes them, and it actually does seize them, have the satisfaction of bringing their wives and daughters to the same place, and, once there, of gaping on a chair in the piazza the wholeday; of going, arms in hand (I mean the knife and fork,) to secure their share of a wretched dinner; of being stifled in the crowd of the ball-room during the evening, and of sleeping, if it is possible, in the midst of such a hubbub, upon a miserable pallet in a cell echoing one's tread from its floor of pine boards. The American passes through the magnificent landscapes on the Hudson without noticing them, because he is one of six hundred or a thousand on board the steamer. And to confess the truth, I have become an American myself in this respect, and I admired the panorama of West Point and the Highlands, only when I found myself alone in my boat on the river.

Democracy is too new a comer upon the earth, to have been able as yet to organise its pleasures and its amusements. In Europe, our pleasures are essentially exclusive, they are aristocratic like Europe itself, and cannot, therefore, be at the command and for the use of the multitude. In this matter, then, as in politics, the American democracy has yet to create every thing afresh. The problem is difficult, but it is not insoluble, for it was once resolved among us. The religious festivals of the Catholic church were eminently democratic; all were called to them, all took part in them. To what transports of joy did not all Europe, great and small, nobles, burgesses, and serfs, give itself up in the time of the crusades, when the victory of Antioch or the capture of Jerusalem was celebrated by processions andTe Deums? Even to this day, in our southern provinces, where faith is not yet extinct, there are ceremonies truly popular; such are the festival of Easter with the representations of the Passion exhibited in the churches, and the processions with banners and crosses, the brotherhoods of penitents with their quaint frocks and flowing robes, and their long files of women and children; with the effigies of the saints in full dress, and their relics piously carried about; and, finally, withthe military and civil pomp, which, notwithstanding the atheism of the law, is mingled with the show. This is the poor man's spectacle, and one which leaves on his mind better and more vivid recollections, than the atrocious dramas of theboulevardand the fire-works of the Barrier of the Throne, leave to the suburban of Paris.

Already democracy, especially in the Western States, is beginning to have its festivals, which thrill its fibres, and stir it with agreeable emotions. There are religious festivals, the Methodist camp-meetings, to which the people press with eager delight, in spite of the philosophical remonstrances of the more refined sects, who find fault with their heated zeal and noisy ranting, and in spite, or rather in consequence, of the convulsionary and hysterical scenes of theanxious bench. In the older States of the North, there are political processions, for the most part mere party exhibitions, but which are interesting in this respect, that the democracy has a share in them; for it is the democratic party that gets up the most brilliant and animated. Beside the camp-meetings, the political processions are the only things in this country, which bear any resemblance to festivals. The party dinners, with their speeches and deluge of toasts, are frigid, if not repulsive; and I have never seen a more miserable affair, than the dinner given by the Opposition, that is to say, by the middle class, at Powelton, in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia. But I stopped involuntarily at the sight of the gigantic hickory-poles which made their solemn entry on eight wheels, for the purpose of being planted by the democracy on the eve of the election. I remember one of these poles, with its top still crowned with green foliage, which came on to the sound of fifes and drums, and was preceded by ranks of democrats, bearing no other badge than a twig of the sacred tree in their hats. It was drawn by eight horses, decorated with ribands and mottoes; Astride on the tree itself, were a dozen Jackson men of the first water, waving flags with an air of anticipated triumph, and shouting,Hurrah for Jackson!

But this entry of the hickory was but a by-matter compared with the procession I witnessed in New York. It was in the night after the closing of the polls, when victory had pronounced in favour of the democratic party. (SeeLetter XV.) The procession was nearly a mile long; the democrats marched in good order to the glare of torches; the banners were more numerous than I had ever seen them in any religious festival; all were in transparency, on account of the darkness. On some were inscribed the names of the democratic societies or sections;Democratic young men of the ninth or eleventh ward; others bore imprecations against the Bank of the United States;Nick BiddleandOld Nickhere figured largely, and formed the pendant of ourlibera nos a malo. Then came portraits of General Jackson afoot and on horseback; there was one in the uniform of a general, and another in the person of the Tennessee farmer, with the famous hickory cane in his hand. Those of Washington and Jefferson, surrounded with democratic mottoes, were mingled with emblems in all tastes and of all colours. Among these figured an eagle, not a painting, but a real live eagle, tied by the legs, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, and hoisted upon a pole, after the manner of the Roman standards. The imperial bird was carried by a stout sailor, more pleased than ever was a sergeant permitted to hold one of the strings of the canopy, in a catholic ceremony. From further than the eye could reach, came marching on the democrats. I was struck with the resemblance of their air to the train that escorts theviaticumin Mexico or Puebla. The American standard-bearers were as grave as the Mexican Indians who bore the sacred tapers. The democratic procession, also, likethe Catholic procession, had its halting places; it stopped before the houses of the Jackson men to fill the air with cheers, and halted at the doors of the leaders of the Opposition, to give three, six, or nine groans. If these scenes were to find a painter, they would be admired at a distance, not less than the triumphs and sacrificial pomps, which the ancients have left us delineated in marble and brass; for they are not mere grotesques after the manner of Rembrandt, they belong to history, they partake of the grand; they are the episodes of a wondrous epic which will bequeath a lasting memory to posterity; that of the coming of democracy.

Yet as festivals and spectacles, these processions are much inferior to revivals, which take place in the camp-meetings. All festivals and ceremonies in which woman does not take part, are incomplete. Why is it that our constitutional ceremonies are so entirely devoid of interest? It is not because the actors are merely commoners, very respectable citizens surely, but very prosaic, and that the pomp of costumes and the fascination of the arts, are banished from them; it is rather because women do not and cannot have a place in them. A wit has said that women are not poets, but they are poetry itself.

I remember what made the charm and the attraction of the processions in my provincial city. We opened our eyes with wonder at the red robe of the chief president; we gazed with delight at the epaulets and gold lace of the general, and more than one youth was inspired with military ardour at that show; we stretched forward with impatience to catch a glimpse of the episcopal train; we threw ourselves on our knees mechanically, on the approach of the canopy with its escort of priests, and the venerable bishop, crowned with the mitre, and bearing the host in his hands; we envied the glory of those boys, whohad the privilege of enacting St. Mark or St. Peter for the day; more than one tall stripling was glad to sink his fifteen years, in which he prided himself, for the sake of taking the character of St. John, clad in a sheepskin; but the whole multitude held their breath, when, beneath the forest of banners, through the peaked frocks of the penitents and the bayonets of the garrison, amidst the surplices and albs of the priests, there appeared in sight one of those young girls in white robes, who represented the holy women and the Mother of the seven woes; or she, who in the person of St. Veronica, displayed the handkerchief, with which the sweat was wiped from the Saviour's brow as he ascended Mount Calvary; or she, who, loaded with gold chains, ribands, and pearls, represented the empress at the side of the emperor;[CZ]or those who had just been confirmed by my lord bishop, and still bore the traces of the emotions excited by that solemn act. So it is because there are women in the camp-meetings, and because they take a not less active part in them than the most rousing preachers, and it is on this account only, that the American democracy throngs to these assemblages. The camp-meetings with their raving Pythonissas have made the fortune of the Methodists, and attracted to their church in America a more numerous body of adherents than is numbered by any of the English sects in Europe.

Take women from the tournaments, and they become nothing more than a fencing-bout; from camp-meetings take away theanxious bench, remove those women who fall into convulsions, shriek, and roll on the ground, who, pale, dishevelled, and haggard, cling to the minister from whom they inhale the holy spirit, or seize the hardened sinner at the door of the tent, or in the passage-way, andstrive to melt his stony heart; it will be in vain, that a majestic forest overshadows the scene, of a beautiful summer's night, under a sky that need not fear a comparison with a Grecian heavens; in vain, will you be surrounded with tents and numberless chariots, that recall to mind the long train of Israel fleeing from Egypt; in vain the distant fires, gleaming amongst the trees, will reveal the forms of the preachers gesticulating above the crowd; in vain, will the echo of the woods fling back the tones of their voice; you will be weary of the spectacle in an hour. But the camp-meetings, as they are now conducted, have the power of holding the people of the West for whole weeks; some have lasted a month.

I allow that the camp-meetings and political processions are as yet only exceptions in America. A people has not a complete national character, until it has its peculiar and appropriate amusements, national festivals, poetry. In this respect, it will not be easy to create American nationality; the American has no past from which to draw inspiration. On quitting the old soil of Europe, on breaking off from England, his fathers left behind them the national chronicles, the traditions, the legends, all that constitutes country, that country which is not carried about on the soles of one's feet. The American, then, has become poor in ideality, in proportion as he has become rich in material wealth. But a democracy always has some resource, so far as imagination is concerned. I cannot pretend to decide how the American democracy will supply the want of a past and of old recollections, any more than I can undertake to pronounce, in what manner it will bridle itself, and curb its own humours. But I am sure that America will have her festivals, her ceremonies, and her art, as I am that society in America will assume a regular organisation; for I believe in the future of American society, or, to speak more correctly, of the beginnings of society, whose growthis visible on the east and still more on the west of the Alleghanies.

In France we have been for more than a century struggling against ourselves, in the attempt to lay aside our national originality. We are striving to become reasonable according to what we imagine to be the English pattern; and after our example the Southern Europeans are endeavouring to torture themselves into a parliamentary and calculating demeanour. Imagination is treated as a lunatic. Noble sentiments, enthusiasm, chivalric loftiness of soul, all that made the glory of France, and gave Spain half the world, is regarded with contempt and derision. The public festivals and popular ceremonies have become the laughing-stock of the free thinkers. Love of the fine arts is nothing more than a frivolous passion. We make the most desperate efforts to starve the heart and soul, conformably to the prescriptions of our religious and political Sangrados. To strip life of the last vestige of taste and art, we have gone so far as to exchange the majestic elegance of the costume, which we borrowed from the Spaniards when they ruled Europe, for the undress of the English, which may be described in one word, as suited to the climate of Great Britain. This could be borne, if we had merely flung away our tournaments, our carousals, our jubilees, our religious festivals, our elegance of garb. But unhappily we have gone to the sources of all national and social poetry, to religion itself, and tried to dry them up. Our manners and customs scarcely retain the slightest tincture of their boasted grace. Politics is abandoned to the dryest matter of fact. The national genius would have to be given over as past cure, did not now and then some gleams and outbursts prove that it is not dead but sleeps, and that the holy fire is yet smouldering beneath the ashes.

France, and the peoples of Southern Europe, of whomshe is the coryphæus, certainly owe much to the philosophy of the 18th century; for that was our Protest, that raised the standard of liberty amongst us, opened a career for the progress of mind, and established individuality. But it must be confessed that it is inferior to German, English, and American Protestantism, because it is irreligious. The writings of the Apostles of that great revolution will survive as literary monuments, but not as lessons of morality; for whatever is irreligious, can have but a transient social value. Place the remains of Voltaire and Montesquieu, of Rousseau and Diderot, in the Pantheon; but on their monuments deposit their works veiled under a shroud. Teach the people to bless their memory; but do not teach it their doctrines, and do net permit it to learn them from servile followers, whom those great writers would disavow, if they could return to the earth; for men like them belong to the present or a future age, but never to the past.

In return for all that has been taken from us, we have received the representative system. This, it has been supposed, would satisfy all our wants, would meet all our wishes in moral and intellectual, as well as in physical things. Far be it from me to undervalue the representative system! I believe in its permanency, although I doubt whether we have yet discovered the form, under which it is suited to the character of the French and the Southern Europeans; but whatever may be its political value, it cannot be denied that it does not, that it never can, of itself alone, make good the place of all that the reformers have robbed us of. It has its ceremonies and its festivals; but these smell too much of the parchment not to disgust our senses. It has, to a certain degree, its dogmas and its mysteries, but it has no hold on the imagination. Art has no sympathy with it; it has not the power to move the heart; and it embraces, therefore, but one fourth of our existence.

I can conceive how representative government shouldhere be made the key-stone of the social arch. An American of fifteen years of age is as reasonable as a Frenchman of forty. Then society here is wholly masculine; woman, who in all countries has little of the spirit of the representative system, here possesses no authority; there are no saloons in the United States. But even here the system no longer exists in its primitive purity except on paper. The field of religion, although much narrowed, it is true, still remains open here, and the imagination still finds food, however meagre, within its limits. But among us, it would be sheer fanaticism to set up the representative system as the pivot of social life. All of us, God be thanked, have a period of youth! Among us, women have a real power, although not enumerated in the articles of the Charter; and our national character has many feminine, I will not say effeminate, features. In vain would you decimate France, and leave only the burghers of forty years, who have the senses calmed, the mind clear of illusions, that is to say, unpoetical and dry; you would hardly then have a community that would be satisfied with constitutional emotions.

This is the cause why France is the theatre of a perpetual struggle between the old and the middle-aged on one side, and the young, who find their bounds too narrow, on the other. Youth accuses age of narrow views, of timidity, of selfishness; the old complain of the greedy ambition which devours the young, and of their ungovernable turbulence. That is the only good government, which satisfies at once the demands for order, regularity, stability and physical prosperity on the part of those of riper years, and fills the longings of the young, and of that portion of society which always continues youthful, for lively sensations, brilliant schemes, and lofty aspirations. By the side of their parliament, the English have their vast colonies, by which this spirit finds vent, over the remotest seas.The Anglo-Americans have the West, and also, like Great Britain, the ocean. This double invasion of the East by the fathers, and of the West by the emancipated sons, is a spectacle of gigantic magnitude and sublime interest. To suppose that we, who stand in need of some vast enterprise, in which some may play a part before the eyes of the world, and others may enjoy the spectacle of their prowess,—to suppose that we shall be content to be forever imprisoned within our own territory, with no other occupation than that of watching or turning the wheels of the representative machine, would be to wish that a man of taste, confined to this paltry hamlet of Bedford, should imagine himself in paradise.

FOOTNOTES:[CZ]This is one of the recollections of the Roman empire, which has left deep impressions in the South of France.

[CZ]This is one of the recollections of the Roman empire, which has left deep impressions in the South of France.

POWER AND LIBERTY.

Richmond, Aug. 16, 1835.

Richmond stands in an admirable situation on the slope of a hill whose base is bathed by the James River. Its Capitol, with its brick columns covered with plaster, with its cornice and architrave of painted wood, produces an effect, at a distance, which even the Parthenon, in the days of Pericles, could not have surpassed; for the sky of Virginia, when it is not darkened by a storm, or veiled with snow, is as beautiful as that of Attica. Richmond has its port nearer than the Piræus was to Athens, while, at the same time it stands upon the falls of James River. Richmond enchanted me from the first by its charmingsituation and the cordiality of its inhabitants; and it pleases me by its ambition, for it aspires to be a metropolis, and it is making the due preparations to assume that character by the great works which it is executing or aiding to execute, canals, railroads, water-works, huge mills, workshops, for which the fall in the river affords an almost unlimited motive power. Here I also found some countrymen, whose love for their country had not been chilled by fifty years of absence and eighty years of age, and who have preserved, amidst the simplicity of American manners, that fine flower of courtesy, of which the germ is daily disappearing amongst us. I went yesterday, for the second time, to visit the cannon and mortars, given to America during her struggle for independence, by Louis XVI. In the Capitol, by the side of the statue of Washington, I found the bust of Lafayette. I heard the names of Rochambeau and d'Estaing pronounced, as if they were old friends who had left but yesterday. I seem to myself, at times to have been miraculously transported, not into France, but on the frontiers.

My admiration of Richmond is not, however, blind; the founders of the new city have plotted out streets one hundred feet wide, like the highways in the style of Louis XIV.; but in our great roads, between the quagmires on the right and left, there is at least a strip of passable pavement or roadway. The streets of new Richmond have neither pavement nor light. In the rainy season, they are dangerous bogs, in which, I am told, that several cows, who are here allowed by the municipal authorities to go at large, have met with the fate of the master of Ravensworth in the Kelpie. Richmond has, also, something of the aspect of Washington; with the exception of the business part of the town, it is neither city nor country; the houses are scattered about on an imaginary plan, and it is almost impossible to find any lines to guide you, or to recognise the street K, F, or D, to which you are referred; for the alphabet has furnished the names here, as the arithmetic has done at Washington. The plot of Richmond has, however, this advantage over that of Washington, that it is on a smaller scale and will be more speedily filled up; whilst Washington with its arrangements for a million inhabitants, will not, perhaps, have fifty thousand, twenty years hence.

There is something in Richmond which offends me more than its bottomless mudholes, and shocks me more than the rudeness of the western Virginians,[DA]whom I met here during the session of the legislature; it is slavery. Half of the population is black or mulatto; physically, the negroes are well used in Virginia, partly from motives of humanity, and partly, because they are so much live stock raised for exportation to Louisiana; morally, they are treated as if they did not belong to the human race. Free or slave, the black is here denied all that can give him the dignity of man. The law forbids the instruction of the slave or the free man of colour in the simplest rudiments of learning, under the severest penalties; the slave has no family; he has no civil rights; he holds noproperty. The white man knows that the slave has opened his ear to the word which every thing here proclaims aloud, liberty; he knows that in secret the negro broods over hopes and schemes of vengeance, and that the exploits and martyrdom of Gabriel, the leader of an old conspiracy, and of Turner, the hero of a more recent insurrection, are still related in the negro cabins.[DB]The precautionary measures which this knowledge has induced the whites to adopt, are such as freeze the heart of a stranger with horror.

Richmond is noted for its tobacco and flour market. The Richmond flour is prized at Rio Janeiro as much as at New York, at Lima as well as at Havana. The largest flour-mill in the world is at Richmond, running twenty pair of stones, containing a great variety of accessory machinery, and capable of manufacturing 600 barrels of flour a day. The reputation of the Richmond flour in foreign markets, like that of the American flour in general, depends upon a system of inspection peculiar to the country, which contravenes, indeed, the theory of absolute commercial freedom, but is essential to the prosperity of American commerce, and has never, that I have heard of, been a subject of complaint. The flour is inspected previous to its being exported. The weight of each barrel and the quality of of the flour are ascertained by the inspector, and branded on the barrel-head. The superior qualities only can be exported; the inspection is real and thorough, and is performed at the expense of the holder. The Havana, Brazilian, or Peruvian merchant is thus perfectly sure of the quality of the merchandise he buys; both the buyer and the seller find their advantage in it.

Commerce can no more dispense with confidence in the market than with credit in the counting-house.

Tobacco is subjected to the same system of inspection, and in general, all the coast States, all those from which produce is exported to foreign parts, have established this system, and applied it to almost all articles in which frauds can be committed. Thus in New York wheat-flour and Indian corn-meal, beef, pork, salt fish, potash, whale oil, lumber, staves, flax-seed, leather, tobacco, hops, spirits, are all inspected. In regard to flour, the law is more rigourous than in respect to other articles. The inspector brands with the wordlightthose barrels which are not of the legal weight, and the exportation of which is also prohibited, and with the wordbadthose which are of poor quality. As for Indian corn, it is required that the grain shall have been kiln-dried before grinding. Flour from other States cannot be sold in the city of New York, even for local consumption, unless it has been inspected the same as if for exportation. Every inspector has the right to search vessels in which he suspects that there is flour that has not been inspected, and to seize what has been so shipped, or what it has been attempted to ship. There are beside various other provisions and penalties to prevent fraud.

If the necessity of these inspections were not sufficiently proved by their good effects and by long experience, it would be by the abuses that prevail in those articles of commerce which are not subjected to the system. Complaints have already been made in Liverpool, that bales of cotton are often made up of an inferior article concealed beneath an outer layer of good quality. From a report addressed to the Chamber of American Commerce in this metropolis of the cotton trade, by the principal cotton-brokers, it appears that this has not been confined to two or three bales, amidst large quantities, but that whole lots of one or two hundred bales have been found thus deficient.

What! it will be said, is there not, then, freedom of commerce in this classic land of liberty? No! the foreign commerce is not free in the United States, because the American people is not willing to expose the industry and commerce of a whole country to be ruined by the first rogue that comes along. The people of this country is eminently a working people; every one is at liberty to work, to choose his profession, and to change it twenty times; every one has the right to go and come on his business, at pleasure, and to transport his person and his industry from the centre to the circumference, and from the circumference to the centre. If the country does not enjoy the political advantages of administrative unity, neither is it hampered in the most petty details of industry by excessive centralisation. No man is obliged to go six hundred miles to solicit the license and personal signature of a minister, overloaded with business, and harassed by parliamentary solicitudes. But American liberty is not a mystical, undefined liberty; it is a practical liberty, in harmony with the peculiar genius of the people and its peculiar destiny; it is a liberty of action and motion, of which the American avails himself to spread himself over the vast territory that Providence has given him, and to subdue it to his uses. The liberty of locomotion is almost absolute with the exception of some restraints imposed by the observance of the Sabbath. The liberty, or rather independence, in matters of industry is also ample; but if it is abused by some individuals, the general tendency is to restrain them by law or by dictatorial measures, or by the influence of public opinion, sometimes expressed in the shape of mobs.

The restraints on internal trade are few; there are, however, some restrictions upon hawkers and pedlers who impose on the credulity of the country people. If no effective bankrupt-law has yet been enacted, severe penalties are provided against false pretences. If stock-jobbing has not been prohibited, it is not from want of will on the part of the legislators, for they are fully alive to the evils of unproductive speculation, which diverts from industry the needful capital; but because they do not see how it is to be effectually prevented. Besides, it is not easy to commit frauds in the United States, in the home trade; for here every body knows every body else, and every one is on the watch against others; and it is not difficult to ascend to the sources of a fraud. In respect to articles designed for the foreign trade, detection is not so easy. There is also here a sort of patriotism, which is by no means at war with the real interests of the parties, and which operates with the fear of public opinion, in keeping up a certain degree of honesty in domestic transactions, and a tone of morality, which, if not wholly above reproach, is certainly far superior to what prevails amongst us; whilst, to many persons, all is fair in dealings with foreigners, whom they look upon as a kind of barbarians.

Previous to 1789, we had numerous restrictions not only on foreign commerce, but on domestic industry, in France. These were all blown away by the Revolution; and certainly the destruction of most of them, which had become antiquated and inapplicable to the existing state of things, was a great gain; but we have run into the contrary extreme, and abolished not only the burdensome restraints, but the most salutary checks, and among them the inspection of exported articles. Yet on the whole we have gained in respect to domestic industry, by sweeping away those often cumbersome regulations; but in regard to our foreign trade, the evil has certainly overborne the good, as the decline of our maritime commerce fully proves.

On the peace of 1814, when the sea was again opened to our vessels, our foreign commerce fell into the hands ofpetty traffickers, whose cupidity exhausted the vocabulary of fraud. During the first years after the Restoration, the French name became discredited in all the markets of the Old and the New World. The Levant trade, of which we had the monopoly, passed into the hands of the English and Austrians. The stuffs, with which we formerly supplied the East, being no longer subject to inspection on exportation, fell short in measure and were inferior in quality. Formerly packages of our goods changed hands without distrust and without search; but it became necessary to submit them to a rigourous examination, for their contents often turned out to be quite different from the invoice. South America was the great theatre of these frauds; water was actually sold for Burgundy, rolls of wood for rolls of ribands. The Bordelese, who, not without reason, charge the prohibitive system with the decline of their prosperity, cannot be blind to the fact, that their own unscrupulous rapacity contributed pretty largely to this result.

As customers could no longer be found to deal with us, these frauds have necessarily been checked. Our foreign trade has gradually fallen into the hands of a few great houses, and this concentration, which has powerfully contributed to the prevalence of honorable dealings in English commerce, has done something towards reviving ours. The small dealers have been driven out of the field; and it is to this cause that we have to attribute the good condition of our trade with the United States. But let us not deceive ourselves; some sleights of hand are still played off; Bordeaux is not yet wholly purged of the infection; French commerce abroad is yet cankered by foul sores. It must be confessed, that, if our public policy has been marked by a good faith and a spirit of disinterestedness, that give us a right to denounce the Punic faith ofperfidious Albion, the English race can proudly oppose the bold andhonourable spirit of its commercial dealings to the pusillanimity and unworthy shifts of our own. Let us confess our shame, and submit to the necessary diet for the cure of so loathsome a leprosy.

The United States constitute a society which moves under the impulse and by the guidance of instinct, rather than according to any premeditated plan; it does not know itself. It rejects the tyranny of a past, which is exclusively military in its character, and yet it is deeply imbued with the sentiment of order. It has been nurtured in the hatred of the old political systems of Europe; but a feeling of the necessity of self-restraint runs through its veins. It is divided between its instinctive perceptions of the future and its aversion to the past; between its thirst after freedom, and its hunger for social order; between its religious veneration of experience, and its horror of the violence of past ages. Hence the apparent contradictions which appear in its tastes and its tendencies; but the confusion is only apparent.

In each State there are two authorities, distinct in their composition and their attributes. The one corresponds to the government in the European social system, to the old Cæsar. At its head is a magistrate who bears the old name of Governor,[DC]with the pompous title of commander-in-chief of the sea and land forces. This authority is reduced to a shadow. In the new States of the West, which have come into the world since the establishment of Independence, its attributes have been gradually suppressed, or rather the citizens have reserved the exercise of them to themselves. Thus the people itself appoint most of the public officers. The management of funds is rarely confided to the Governor, but is generally entrusted to a special board of Commissioners. The Governor has not the control of the forces of the State; strictly speaking, indeed, there are none; but in case of necessity, the Sheriff has the right to summon theposse comitatus, and to oblige all bystanders, armed or not, to render him assistance, and to act as police officers. There is no regular police, there are no passports; but nobody can stop at an inn without entering his name and residence on the register. This register is open to the examination of all in the bar-room, which is a necessary appendage of every public place, and there it remains at all times to be turned over by all. The bar-keeper fills, in fact, the post of commissioner of police, and the crowd that assembles in the bar-room to read the newspapers, smoke, drink whiskey, and talk politics, that is to say all travellers, would, in case of necessity, be ready to act the part of constables. This is real self-government; these are the obligations and responsibilities, that every citizen takes upon himself when he disarms authority. The power of the Governor, who was formerly the representative of royalty, the brilliant reflexion of the omnipotence of the proud monarchs of Europe, is crumbled to dust. Even the exterior of power has not been kept up; he has no guards, no palace, no money. The Governors of Indiana and Illinois have a salary of 1000 dollars a year, without a house or any accessories. There is not a trader in Cincinnati, who does not pay his head-clerk better; the clerks at Washington have 700 dollars a year.

This fall of power is to be explained by other considerations than those drawn from the principle of self-government. The ancient power was Cæsar, was military in its character. American society has denied Cæsar. In Europe, it has been necessary that Cæsar should be strong for the security of national independence; for in Europe we are always on the eve of war. The United States, on the contrary, are organised on the principle, that war between the States is an impossibility, and that a foreign war is scarcely probable. The Americans, therefore, can dispense with Cæsar, but we are obliged to cleave to him. Yet it is not to be inferred that they can and will long dispense with authority, or that they are even now free from its control. There is, in America, religious authority, which never closes its eyes; there is the authority of opinion, which is severe to rigour; there is the authority of the legislatures, which sometimes savours of the omnipotence of parliament; there is the dictatorial authority of mobs.

Still more; by the side of the power of Cæsar, in political affairs, another regular authority is beginning to show itself, which embraces within its domain the modern institutions and new establishments of public utility, such as the public routes, banks, and elementary schools, that, in the United States, have acquired an unparallelled magnitude. Thus there are Canal Commissioners, Bank Commissioners, School Commissioners. Their power is great and real. The Canal Commissioners establish administrative regulations, which they change at will, without previous notice. They fix and change the rate of tolls; they are surrounded by a large body of agents, entirely dependent upon them and removeable at pleasure; they are charged with the management of large sums of money; the sums that passed through the hands of the Pennsylvania Commissioners amounted to nearly23,000,000 dollars. They are certainly subjected to a less minute and rigourous control, than is extended to the most trifling affairs of our Board of Public Works or our Engineer Department. If they had had our financial regulations, our system of responsibility, our court of accounts, they would, certainly, have spent ten years more in executing the works entrusted to them, and they would have executed them no better and no cheaper. The Bank Commissioners in the State of New York, by the provisions of the Safety Fund Act, are clothed, by right, if not in fact, with a sort of dictatorship; they have, in certain cases, power of life and death over the banks.

It is in the new States, especially, that one should see the Commissioners exercise their powers. Last summer the Ohio Canal Commissioners, perceiving or thinking that they perceived, a conspiracy among the persons engaged in the transportation of goods on the New York canals to raise the rates of freight, immediately adopted a resolution to this effect; whereas certain persons have shown a disposition to make exorbitant charges, the rates of toll on all articles that may have paid on the New York canal, above a certain rate of freight, shall be double. This was establishing amaximum, not only on their own territory, but on that of a neighbouring State. A director-general of our public routes, who should take such a liberty, would be forthwith denounced as violating the principles of commercial freedom. In the United States, every body agrees that the Ohio Commissioners were right; that the profits of the transportation companies would be somewhat less, but the public would be the gainer, and the former accordingly submitted.

In the United States, then, the general weal is the supreme law; and it immediately raises its head and vindicates its rights, when it feels the encroachments of private interest. The system of government in this countryis, therefore, not so much a system of absolute liberty and free will, as a system of equality, or rather it takes the character of a strong rule by the majority. In looking at some of the provisions in the charters of incorporated companies, one is tempted to ask how associations could be formed on such conditions, and how they have been able to procure capital. In Massachusetts, the share-holders are individually responsible for the debts of the company. In Pennsylvania, it is expressly provided, that, if at any time the privileges granted to the corporation shall prove to be contrary to the public good, the legislature may revoke them. This is the germ of despotism; but in the United States, Cæsar is disarmed; the old feudal line has neither fangs nor claws. Industry is prompt to take alarm at the exercise of despotism by Cæsar; but it is only in extreme cases, that it will feel any distrust of a society which lives and flourishes by labour, and all whose ends and aims, public and private, are self-aggrandisement by means of productive labour.

To understand fully the meaning of the word liberty, as it is used in this country, it is necessary to go to the sources of the American population; that is to say, to the origin of the distinction between the Yankee and the Virginian race. They have arrived at their notions of liberty by different avenues, the one by the gate of religion, and the other by that of politics, and have, therefore, understood it very differently.

When the Yankee came to settle himself in the New World, it was not for the purpose of founding an empire, but to establish a church. He fled from a land, which had shaken off the yoke of the papal Babylon, only to fall under that of the Babylon of episcopacy. He left behind him Satan, his pomp, and his works; he shook from the soles of his feet the dust of the inhospitable land of the Stuarts and the Anglican bishops; he sought a refugein which he might practise his own mode of worship and obey what he believed to be the law of God. The Pilgrims, landed on Plymouth rock, established a liberty according to their own notion; it was a liberty for their own use exclusively, within whose embrace they felt perfectly at ease themselves, without caring if others were stifled by it. It might have been expected, that, proscribed themselves, they would at least have admitted religious toleration; but they did not grant it the narrowest corner, and even now it is far from having elbow room among them. Originally, the right of citizenship was extended only to Puritans like themselves; the state and the church were confounded; it was not until 1832 that they were definitely and completely separated in Massachusetts. The Jew and the Quaker were forbidden to touch the soil under the severest penalties, and in case of return, under pain of death. At present, if the law tolerates the Roman Catholic, public opinion does not, as the burning of the Ursuline convent in 1834, and the scandalous scenes exhibited at the trials of the incendiaries, testify. Still less mercy is shown to unbelief; witness the trial of Abner Kneeland for blasphemy, on account of his pantheistic writings.[DD]

The Yankee type exhibits little variety; all Yankees seem to be cast in the same mould; it was, therefore, very easy for them to organise a system of liberty for themselves, that is, to construct a frame, within which they should have the necessary freedom of motion. On their arrival they accordingly formed the plan of one, not merely tracing its general outlines and form, but dividing it into numerous compartments controlling all the details of life,with as much minuteness as the Mosaic law did that of the Hebrews. Thus organised, it became impossible for any man not cut to the same pattern, to establish himself among them. Although most of those laws which thus reduced life to rules,[DE]have been abrogated, especially since the Revolution, still their spirit survives. The habits which gave them birth, and to which, by a natural reaction, they gave strength, still exist, and to this day it is observable, that no foreigner settles in New England.

As for us, who resemble each other in nothing, except in differing from every body else, for us, to whom variety is as necessary as the air, to whom a life of rules would be a subject of horrour, the Yankee system would be torture. Their liberty is not the liberty to outrage all that is sacred on earth, to set religion at defiance, to laugh morals to scorn, to undermine the foundations of social order, to mock at alltraditions and all received opinions; it is neither the liberty of being a monarchist in a republican country, nor that of sacrificing the honour of the poor man's wife or daughter to one's base passions; it is not even the liberty to enjoy one's wealth by a public display, for public opinion has its sumptuary laws, to which all must conform under pain of moral outlawry; nor even that of living in private different from the rest of the world. The liberty of the Yankee is essentially limited and special like the nature of the race. We should consider it as framed after the model of the liberty of Figaro; but the Yankee is satisfied with it, because it leaves him all the latitude he desires, and because of all the lessons of the Bible, that of the forbidden fruit, which we have not been able to fix in our brain, has made the deepest impression on his.

As the Yankee does not suffer under these restraints, as he is, or what amounts to the same thing, thinks himself, free, a preventive authority is unnecessary for him. This is the reason why there is no appearance of authority in New England, and that an armed force, a police, are even more unknown there than in the rest of the Union. The absence of a visible authority imposes on us, and we think that the American in general, and the Yankee in particular, is more free than we are. I am persuaded, however, that if we measure liberty by the number of actions that are permitted or tolerated in public and private life, the advantage is on our side, not only in comparison with New England, but also with the white population of the South.

The Virginian is more disposed to understand liberty in our manner. His disposition has a greater resemblance to ours; his faculties are much less special, more general than those of the Yankee; his mind is more ardent, his tastes more varied. But it is the Yankee that now rules the Union; it is his liberty which has given its principalfeatures to the model of American liberty. Yet to extend its empire, it has been obliged to borrow some of the characteristic traits of Virginian liberty; or, I might say, of French liberty, for the high-priest of American democracy was a Virginian, who had imbibed in Paris the doctrines of the philosophy of the 18th century. American liberty, as it now is, may be considered the result of a mixture, in unequal proportions, of the theories of Jefferson with the New England usages. From these dissimilar tendencies has resulted a series of contradictory measures, which have become strangely complicated with each other, and which might puzzle and deceive a careless observer. It is in consequence of these opposite influences in the bosom of American society, that such conflicting judgments have been passed upon it; it is because the Yankee type is at present the stronger, whilst the Virginian was superior in the period of the revolution, that the ideas which the sight of America now suggests, are so different from those which she inspired at the epoch of Independence.

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