No More Learning

'But nowadays the Bridge ain't wut they show,
So much ez Em'son, Hawthorne, an' Thoreau.
I know the village, though; was sent there once
A-schoolin', 'cause to home I played the dunce;
An' I 've ben sence a visitin' the Jedge,
Whose garding whispers with the river's edge,
Where I 've sot mornin's lazy as the bream,
Whose on'y business is to head upstream,
(We call 'em punkin-seed,) or else in chat
Along 'th the Jedge, who covers with his hat
More wit an' gumption an' shrewd Yankee sense
Than there is mosses on an ole stone fence. '

Concerning the subject-matter of the verses. I have not the leisure at
present to write so fully as I could wish, my time being occupied with
the preparation of a discourse for the forthcoming bicentenary
celebration of the first settlement of Jaalam East Parish. It may
gratify the publick interest to mention the circumstance, that my
investigations to this end have enabled me to verify the fact (of much
historick importance, and hitherto hotly debated) that Shearjashub
Tarbox was the first child of white parentage born in this town, being
named in his father's will under date August 7th, or 9th, 1662. It is
well known that those who advocate the claims of Mehetable Goings are
unable to find any trace of her existence prior to October of that year.
As respects the settlement of the Mason and Slidell question, Mr. Biglow
has not incorrectly stated the popular sentiment, so far as I can judge
by its expression in this locality. For myself, I feel more sorrow than
resentment: for I am old enough to have heard those talk of England who
still, even after the unhappy estrangement, could not unschool their
lips from calling her the Mother-Country. But England has insisted on
ripping up old wounds, and has undone the healing work of fifty years;
for nations do not reason, they only feel, and the _spretae injuria
formae_ rankles in their minds as bitterly as in that of a woman. And
because this is so, I feel the more satisfaction that our Government has
acted (as all Governments should, standing as they do between the people
and their passions) as if it had arrived at years of discretion. There
are three short and simple words, the hardest of all to pronounce in any
language (and I suspect they were no easier before the confusion of
tongues), but which no man or nation that cannot utter can claim to have
arrived at manhood. Those words are, _I was wrong;_ and I am proud that,
while England played the boy, our rulers had strength enough from the
People below and wisdom enough from God above to quit themselves like
men.

The sore points on both sides have been skilfully exasperated by
interested and unscrupulous persons, who saw in a war between the two
countries the only hope of profitable return for their investment in
Confederate stock, whether political or financial. 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.