No More Learning

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?

There was nothing in all this to exasperate a philosopher, much to make
him smile rather; but the earth's surface is not chiefly inhabited by
philosophers, and I revive the recollection of it now in perfect
good-humour, merely by way of suggesting to our _ci-devant_ British
cousins, that it would have been easier for them to hold their tongues
than for us to keep our tempers under the circumstances.

The English Cabinet made a blunder, unquestionably, in taking it so
hastily for granted that the United States had fallen forever from their
position as a first-rate power, and it was natural that they should vent
a little of their vexation on the people whose inexplicable obstinacy in
maintaining freedom and order, and in resisting degradation, was likely
to convict them of their mistake. But if bearing a grudge be the sure
mark of a small mind in the individual, can it be a proof of high spirit
in a nation? If the result of the present estrangement between the two
countries shall be to make us more independent of British twaddle
(_Indomito nec dira ferens stipendia Tauro_), so much the better; but if
it is to make us insensible to the value of British opinion in matters
where it gives us the judgment of an impartial and cultivated outsider,
if we are to shut ourselves out from the advantages of English culture,
the loss will be ours, and not theirs. Because the door of the old
homestead has been once slammed in our faces, shall we in a huff reject
all future advances of conciliation, and cut ourselves foolishly off
from any share in the humanizing influences of the place, with its
ineffable riches of association, its heirlooms of immemorial culture,
its historic monuments, ours no less than theirs, its noble gallery of
ancestral portraits? We have only to succeed, and England will not only
respect, but, for the first time, begin to understand us. And let us
not, in our justifiable indignation at wanton insult, forget that
England is not the England only of snobs who dread the democracy they do
not comprehend, but the England of history, of heroes, statesmen, and
poets, whose names are dear, and their influence as salutary to us as to
her.

Let us strengthen the hands of those in authority over us, and curb our
own tongues, remembering that General Wait commonly proves in the end
more than a match for General Headlong, and that the Good Book ascribes
safety to a multitude, indeed, but not to a mob, of counsellours.