No More Learning

The always
supercilious, often insulting, and sometimes even brutal tone of British
journals and publick men has certainly not tended to soothe whatever
resentment might exist in America.

'Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me down stairs? '

We have no reason to complain that England, as a necessary consequence
of her clubs, has become a great society for the minding of other
people's business, and we can smile good-naturedly when she lectures
other nations on the sins of arrogance and conceit: but we may justly
consider it a breach of the political _convenances_ which are expected
to regulate the intercourse of one well-bred government with another,
when men holding places in the ministry allow themselves to dictate our
domestic policy, to instruct us in our duty, and to stigmatize as unholy
a war for the rescue of whatever a high-minded people should hold most
vital and most sacred. Was it in good taste, that I may use the mildest
term, for Earl Russell to expound our own Constitution to President
Lincoln, or to make a new and fallacious application of an old phrase
for our benefit, and tell us that the Rebels were fighting for
independence and we for empire? As if all wars for independence were by
nature just and deserving of sympathy, and all wars for empire ignoble
and worthy only of reprobation, or as if these easy phrases in any way
characterized this terrible struggle,--terrible not so truly in any
superficial sense, as from the essential and deadly enmity of the
principles that underlie it. His Lordship's bit of borrowed rhetoric
would justify Smith O'Brien, Nana Sahib, and the Maori chieftains, while
it would condemn nearly every war in which England has ever been
engaged. Was it so very presumptuous in us to think that it would be
decorous in English statesmen if they spared time enough to acquire some
kind of knowledge, though of the most elementary kind, in regard to this
country and the questions at issue here, before they pronounced so
off-hand a judgment? Or is political information expected to come
Dogberry-fashion in England, like reading and writing, by nature?

And now all respectable England is wondering at our irritability, and
sees a quite satisfactory explanation of it in our national vanity.
_Suave mari magno_, it is pleasant, sitting in the easy-chairs of
Downing Street, to sprinkle pepper on the raw wounds of a kindred people
struggling for life, and philosophical to find in self-conceit the cause
of our instinctive resentment. Surely we were of all nations the least
liable to any temptation of vanity at a time when the gravest anxiety
and the keenest sorrow were never absent from our hearts. Nor is conceit
the exclusive attribute of any one nation. The earliest of English
travellers, Sir John Mandeville, took a less provincial view of the
matter when he said, 'For fro what partie of the erthe that men duellen,
other aboven or beneathen, it semethe alweys to hem that duellen that
thei gon more righte than any other folke. ' The English have always had
their fair share of this amiable quality. We may say of them still, as
the authour of the 'Lettres Cabalistiques' said of them more than a
century ago, _'Ces derniers disent naturellement qu'il n'y a qu'eux qui
soient estimables_'.
And, as he also says,_'J'aimerois presque autant
tomber entre les mains d'un Inquisiteur que d'un Anglois qui me fait
sentir sans cesse combien il s'estime plus que moi, et qui ne daigne me
parler que pour injurier ma Nation et pour m'ennuyer du recit des
grandes qualites de la sienne_. ' Of _this_ Bull we may safely say with
Horace, _habet faenum in cornu. _ What we felt to be especially insulting
was the quiet assumption that the descendants of men who left the Old
World for the sake of principle, and who had made the wilderness into a
New World patterned after an Idea, could not possibly be susceptible of
a generous or lofty sentiment, could have no feeling of nationality
deeper than that of a tradesman for his shop. One would have thought, in
listening to England, that we were presumptuous in fancying that we were
a nation at all, or had any other principle of union than that of booths
at a fair, where there is no higher notion of government than the
constable, or better image of God than that stamped upon the current
coin.

It is time for Englishmen to consider whether there was nothing in the
spirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to
rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the
part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as
ours then was, of foreign interference. Was there nothing in the
indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the
Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in
the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the blood of
a people already overcharged with doubt, suspicion, and terrible
responsibility? The laity in any country do not stop to consider points
of law, but they have an instinctive perception of the _animus_ that
actuates the policy of a foreign nation; and in our own case they
remembered that the British authorities in Canada did not wait till
diplomacy could send home to England for her slow official tinder-box to
fire the 'Caroline. ' Add to this, what every sensible American knew,
that the moral support of England was equal to an army of two hundred
thousand men to the Rebels, while it insured us another year or two of
exhausting war. It was not so much the spite of her words (though the
time might have been more tastefully chosen) as the actual power for
evil in them that we felt as a deadly wrong. Perhaps the most immediate
and efficient cause of mere irritation was, the sudden and unaccountable
change of manner on the other side of the water. Only six months before,
the Prince of Wales had come over to call us cousins; and everywhere it
was nothing but 'our American brethren,' that great offshoot of British
institutions in the New World, so almost identical with them in laws,
language, and literature,--this last of the alliterative compliments
being so bitterly true, that perhaps it will not be retracted even now.
To this outburst of long-repressed affection we responded with genuine
warmth, if with something of the awkwardness of a poor relation
bewildered with the sudden tightening of the ties of consanguinity when
it is rumored that he has come into a large estate. Then came the
Rebellion, and, _presto! _ a flaw in our titles was discovered, the plate
we were promised at the family table is flung at our head, and we were
again the scum of creation, intolerably vulgar, at once cowardly and
overbearing,--no relations of theirs, after all, but a dreggy hybrid of
the basest bloods of Europe. Panurge was not quicker to call Friar John
his _former_ friend. I cannot help thinking of Walter Mapes's jingling
paraphrase of Petronius,--

'Dummodo sim splendidis vestibus ornatus,
Et multa familia sim circumvallatus,
Prudens sum et sapiens et morigeratus,
Et tuus nepos sum et tu meus cognatus,'--

which I may freely render thus:--

So long as I was prosperous, I'd dinners by the dozen,
Was well-bred, witty, virtuous, and everybody's cousin;
If luck should turn, as well she may, her fancy is so flexile,
Will virtue, cousinship, and all return with her from exile?