A. D. the rigid devotion of the young married women to their households and nurseries. It is something to have travelled nearly over the 1850 whole extent of the Union without having encountered a single specimen either of servility or incivility of manner; by the last I intend to denote intentional rudeness. Elections may seem the universal business, topic, and passion of life, but they are, at least with but few exceptions, carried on without any approach to tumult, rudeness, or disorder; those which I happened to see were the most sedate, unimpassioned processes I can imagine. In the Free States, at least, the people at large bear an active, and I believe, on the whole, a useful part in all the concerns of internal government and practical daily life; men of all classes, and especially of the more wealthy and instructed, take a zealous share in almost every pursuit of usefulness and philanthropy; they visit the hospitals and asylums, they attend the daily instructions of the schools, they give lectures at lyceums and institutes. I am glad to think that I may be treading in their foot-steps on this occasion. I have already mentioned with just praise the universal diffusion and excellent quality of popular education, as established especially in the States of New England, the powerful Empire State of New York, and, I may add, the prosperous and aspiring State of Ohio. Without venturing to weigh the preponderating recommendations or deficiencies of the Voluntary System, I may fairly ask, what other communities are so amply supplied with the facilities of public worship for all their members? The towns, old and young, bristle with churches; they are almost always well filled; the Sabbath, in the Eastern and Northern States at least, is scrupulously observed, and with the most unbounded freedom of conscience, and a nearly complete absence of polemical strife and bitterness, there is apparently a close union of feeling and practice in rendering homage to God. Though it would appear difficult, and must certainly be ungracious, to paint the reverse side of such a country and such a people, a severe observer would not be long at fault. With respect to their scenery itself, while he could not deny that within its vast expanse it contained at times both sublimity and beauty, he might establish against it a charge of monotony, to which the immense continuities of the same surfaces, whether of hill, valley, wood, lake, or river— the straight unbroken skirt of forest, the entire absence of single trees, the square parallelograms of the cleared spaces, the uniform line of zig-zag fences, the staring squareness of the new wooden houses, all powerfully contribute. In regard to climate, without dwelling on such partial influences as the malaria which desolates the stunted pine-barrens of North Carolina, and banishes every white native of South Carolina from their rice-plains during the entire summer, the hot damps which festoon the trees on the southern coast with a funereal drapery of grey moss, the yellow fever which decimates the quays of New Orleans, and the feverish agues which line the banks of the Mississippi, it would be impossible to deny the violent alternations of temperature which have a more general prevalence, and it is certain that much fewer robust forms and ruddy complexions are to be seen than in our own more even latitudes. Passing from the physical to the moral atmosphere, amidst all the vaunted equality of the American freemen, there seemed to be a more implicit deference to custom, a more passive submission to what is assumed to be the public opinion of the day or hour, than would be paralleled in many aristocratic or even despotic communities. This quiet acquiescence in the prevailing tone, this complete abnegation of individual sentiment, is naturally most perceptible in the domain of politics, but I thought that it also in no inconsiderable degree pervaded the social circle, biassed the decisions of the judicial bench, and even infected the solemn teachings of the pulpit. To this source may probably in some measure be traced the remarkable similarity in the manners, deportment, conversation, and tone of feeling, which has so generally struck travellers from abroad in American society. Who that has seen, can ever forget the slow and melancholy silence of the couples who walk arm-in-arm to the tables of the great hotels, or of the unsocial groups who gather round the greasy meals of the steam-boats, lap up the five minutes' meal, come like shadows, so depart? One of their able public men made an observation to me, which struck me as pungent, and perhaps true, that it was probably the country in which there was less misery and less happiness than in any other of the world. There are other points of manners on which I am not inclined to dilate, but to which it would at least require time to be reconciled. I may just intimate that their native plant of tobacco lies at the root of much that we might think objectionable. However necessary and laudable the general devotion to habits of industry and the practical business of life may be, and though there are families and circles in which no grace, no charm, no accomplishment, are wanting, yet it cannot be denied, that among the nation at large, the empire of dollars, cents, and material interests, holds a very preponderating sway, and that art and all its train of humanities exercise at present but an enfeebled and restricted influence. If we ascend from social to political life, and from manners to institutions, we should find that the endless cycles of electioneering preparations and contests, although they may be carried on for the most part without the riotous turbulence, or overt bribery, by which they are sometimes but too notoriously disgraced among ourselves, still leave no intermission for repose in the public mind; enter into all the relations of existence; subordinate to themselves every other question of internal and foreign policy; lead their public men, I will not say their best, but the average of them, to pander to the worst prejudices, the meanest tastes, the most malig A. D. 1850 A. D. 1850 nant resentments of the people; at each change of administration incite the new rulers to carry the spirit of proscription into every department of the public service, from the minister at a great foreign court, to the post-master of some half-barbarous outpost,thus tending to render those whose functions ought to withdraw them the most completely from party influences the most unscrupulous partizans; and would make large masses welcome war and even acquiesce in ruin, if it appeared that they could thus counteract the antagonist tactics, humiliate the rival leader, or remotely influence the election of the next President. It is already painfully felt that as far as the universal choice of the people was relied on to secure for the highest office of the state the most commanding ability or the most signal merit, it may be pronounced to have failed. There may be less habitual and actual noise in Congress than in our own Parliament, but the time of the House of Representatives, not without cost to the constituent body which pays for their services, is continuously taken up, when not engrossed by a speech of some days' duration, with wrangles upon points of order and angry recriminations; the language used in debate has occasionally sounded the lowest depths of coarse and virulent acrimony, and the floor of the legislative hall has actually been the scene of violent personal encounter. The manners of the barely civilized West, where it has been known that counsel challenge judges on the bench, and members of the legislature fire off rifles at the Speaker as he sits in the chair, would appear to be gradually invading the very inner shrine of the Constitution. Having done justice to the strictness and purity of morals which distinguish many of the more settled portions of the continent, it cannot be concealed that the reckless notions and habits of the vagrant pioneers of the West, evinced as these are by the practices of gambling, drinking, and licentiousness, by an habitual disregard of the Sabbath, and by more constant swearing than I ever heard any where else, fearfully disfigure that great valley of the Mississippi, destined inevitably, at no distant day, to be the preponderating section of the entire Union. It is at this day impossible to go into any society, especially of the older and more thoughtful men, some of whom may themselves have borne an eminent part in the earlier struggles and service of the commonwealth, without hearing the degeneracy of modern times, and the downward tendency of all things, despondingly insisted upon. At the period of my visit, besides the numerous instances of individual bankruptcy and insolvency, not, alas! peculiar to the New World, the doctrine of repudiation, officially promulgated by sovereign States, had given an unpleasing confirmation to what is perhaps the prevailing tendency among retired politicians. I have reserved for the last topic of animadversion the crowning evil-the capital danger-the mortal plague-spot-Slavery. I have not disclaimed the original responsibility of my own country in introducing and riveting it upon her dependencies; I do not disguise the portentous difficulties in the way of adequate remedy to the great and growing disease. But what I cannot shut my eyes on is that while it lasts, it must still continue, in addition to the actual amount of suffering and wrong which it entails on the enslaved, to operate with terrible re-action on the dominant class, to blunt the moral sense, to sap domestic virtue, to degrade independent industry, to check the onward march of enterprise, to sow the seeds of suspicion, alarm, and vengeance in both internal and external intercourse, to distract the national councils, to threaten the permanence of the Union, and to leave a brand, a bye-word, and a jest upon the name of Freedom. Having thus endeavoured, without consciousness of any thing mis-stated or exaggerated, though of much that is wanting and incomplete on either side, to sum up the good and the bad, I leave my hearers to draw their own conclusions from the whole; there are large materials both for approval and attack, ample grounds both for hope and fear. Causes are occasionally at work which almost appear to portend a disruption of the Federal Union; at the same time a strong sentiment of pride about it, arising partly from an honest patriotism, partly from a feeling of complacency in its very size and extent, may tend indefinitely to postpone any such pregnant result; but whatever may be the solution of that question, whatever the issue of the future destinies assigned to the great American Republic, it is impossible to have contemplated her extent, her resources, the race that has mainly peopled her, the institutions she has derived or originated, the liberty which has been their life-blood, the industry which has been their offspring, and the free Gospel which has been published on her wide plains and wafted by her thousand streams, without nourishing the belief, and the hope, that it is reserved for her to do much, in the coming generations, for the good of man and the glory of God. A. D. 1850 A. D. THE GREAT EXHIBITION. The great event of the year 1851 has passed into history, in whose pages men must in future read the records of the most 1851 gigantic project that has ever been attempted for bringing together the industrial products of the world, and calling into peaceful competition the civilised inhabitants of the earth. From these memorials of the rise, progress, and successful issue of the Great Industrial Exhibition the philosopher and the political economist -the statesman and the manufacturer-the speculative as well as the practical man— -will be able to draw deductions of vast importance to the well-being of society. For upwards of five months was witnessed the unparalleled spectacle of myriads of people of all nations and of all classes flocking daily to render homage at the shrine of industry, unrestrained by any stronger power than the presence of a handful of policemen, and the influence of the moral sentiment which makes men living under a free constitution respect the laws. The result has justified the glowing eulogium pronounced by Lord Carlisle, who, when the design was yet struggling into birth, said, at the York banquet, that "the promoters of the Exhibition were giving a new impulse to civilisation, and bestowing an additional reward upon industry, and supplying a fresh guarantee to the amity of nations. The nations were stirring at their call, but not as the trumpet sounds to battle; they were summoned to the peaceful field of a nobler competition: not to build the superiority or predominance of one country on the depression and prostration of another-but where all might strive who could do most to embellish, improve, and elevate their common humanity." Origin. It must be borne in mind that although the example of our neighbours, the French, had a powerful effect in stimulating our efforts, and that the results following the quinquennial expositions held at Paris were such as to induce other nations to follow her example by the institution of industrial exhibitions, which have been attended with the most encouraging success, England, Ireland, and Scotland, had for upwards of a century their several associations for the encouragement of arts and manufactures. In each of these associations we perceive a distinct acknowledgment of the exhibition principle, as also that of a public recognition of ingenuity and skill by rewards of medals and certificates. The Society of Arts" had, from its very commencement, in 1753, acted more or less in this direction; but it was not until after his Royal 66 |