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ART. IX.-AMERICAN ANXIETIES.

Correspondence with the United States respecting Central America, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 1856.

Correspondence respecting the Mosquito Territory, presented to the House of Commons, July 3d, 1848, in pursuance of their Address of April 3d, 1848.

Correspondence with Mr. Wallenstein, Consul-General for Guatemala and Costa Rica, presented to both Houses of Parliament, 1856. Notes on Central America, particularly the States of Honduras and San Salvador, and the proposed Honduras Inter-Oceanic Railway. By E..G. Squier, formerly Chargé d'Affaires of the United States to the Republics of Central America: with original maps and illustrations. London: Sampson Low. New York: Harper Brothers. 1856.

Papers relative to Recruiting in the United States, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 1856.

It is a disastrous thing when the very connecting link which binds together the history of nations becomes the greatest obstruction to the freedom and profit of their intercourse; and yet we must fear that thus, in great measure, do matters now stand between England and America. The tie of a common ancestry, the bonds of mental and moral similarity, the community in law, language, and religion, are with a large party in the United States, and with not a few, we fear, amongst ourselves, little more than galling memorials of that identity of race and temper which, more almost than any other influence, heightens the bitterness of every dispute. The tie of community in race between rival nations is too often like an isthmus between neighbouring continents,-at first a connecting pathway of union, but later an irritating obstacle to the exchanges of a riper civilisation, and a permanent temptation to petty quarrels ;-at once bridging the wholesome chasm which would mark out clearly the limits of right, and interposing an unwelcome barrier to the free interchange of equal benefits. An isthmus is the true place for a quarrel,-too narrow for a natural mingling of states, just wide enough for a hostile meeting of statesmen; and what Panama is to our foreign ministers, that the isthmus of Anglo-Saxon descent is becoming to the two peoples, a bond tight enough to excite jealousy, and too narrow to inspire affection. Could it be severed,-could the "estranging

sea" flow in between our nationalities as well as between our empires,—we should probably look upon each other with a more genial and respectful interest. England might then cease to feel a tacit reproach in the voracity of American ambition, and America to see insult in the dumb indifference of English hauteur. It is not a little because our own deep though suppressed delight in empire shrinks from seeing itself translated into ugly and boastful words, that we so intensely detest the frothy vaunts of our filibustering relatives; it is not a little because they in their turn are conscious of a devouring pride of caste themselves, that they are so repelled by the frigid assumption of English superiority. But notwithstanding this worst embitterment of our mutual discords, that we have so intimate and rankling a sense in ourselves of the evil which we see in each other, the best English and the best Americans have the closest possible sympathies. They hold in common the great political faith of all Protestant nations,-that government should be on openlyconfessed principles, not a secret art of dexterous management; and that, aiming constantly at being self-government, it should respect, as far as possible, the conscientious scruples of the resistance it is obliged to overrule. These have ever been the two leading political principles of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants,-no reserve, and no unnecessary pressure;-an open exposition of policy; and plenty of room for the free expansion of protesting minorities. With little enough tenderness or delicacy about unclaimed rights, true Anglo-Saxons have always by nature respected honest firmness, even when unbacked by force, and have never endured an attempt to manage them by underhand statesmanship. These were exactly the two grounds of their hatred to the Stuarts,-that that foolish and despotic race strove to trample out even the signs of discontent, instead of permitting it, so far as it was amenable to practical authority; and that they strove to practise upon them by trickery, instead of openly insisting on their own way. And this possession of a common political tradition unites the people of England and America, we trust, still, not merely by a bond of memory, which, taken alone, is apt to nourish jealousy, but by extending that memory into a common political aim. Between England and the northern states of America, at least, we firmly believe that this tie is strong and lasting.

But over the temporary government of America, and over the whole face, and not, we fear, the mere surface of society in the south, there has come a sad change, which two evil spirits have mainly conspired to work-the despotic spirit nourished by slavery, and the time-serving artful spirit nourished by the necessity for swaying a vast democracy. Englishmen are strangely

metamorphosed by living mainly with their inferiors, or by living only amongst those whose interests and opinions are identical with their own. No national character needs social compression more than ours. Naturally unsympathetic and phleg matic, our countrymen are apt to become insolent by living with subordinates, and selfishly inconsiderate by living only with equals. We need a high state of social condensation, the weight and pressure of classes above and classes below,-to keep alive in us the characteristic virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race,fairness in the whole people, and candour in the rulers. Take off this pressure, as it is taken off in the straggling settlements of young America, and the solid fair Englishman is likely enough to expand into the swaggering selfish democrat, who, having never felt the weight or solicitation of other claims, has forgotten his respect for the liberty of others, and is as enraged by opposition as ever was the selfish mob of Athens or Rome. Except in the large cities of the north, there is no sufficient complexity of interests in the American society; all its members are on a dead level, having the same wishes and needs, and no daily experience of the necessity of concession to conflicting claims. The consequence is, that the people-like an only child get the tyrannical habits of an only class; and their rulers quickly learn the mean arts of humouring them, finding that their spoiled democratic temper brooks no resistance. It is worse still where the demon of slavery is at work under a warmer sun than usually quickens the frigid temper of the Saxon race. There a spirit of despotism is nourished in the place of that phlegmatic fairness which is our national safeguard, and the regard for the scruples and convictions of protesting minorities is lost in the domincering of arbitrary passion.

These are the influences which have alienated America's sympathies from England, and brought forth their full fruits in the administration of President Pierce. That administration, as all England is now repeating, does not represent the true American nation; but it does represent emphatically those evil influences that threaten to break the ties between us and them. It is the administration in which slavery has broken its parole, and passed the compromise-limits within which it had solemnly pledged itself to stay. It is the administration in which a great territory has not only been laid open to possible slavery by the influence of the federal government, but forced into a reception of actual slavery by invaders at whom that government has connived. And while all Nebraska has been exposed to the attack, Kansas seized, Lawrence sacked, and Mr. Senator Sumner beaten in the Senate-chamber, all with the same accompaniments of cowardly artifice, in the interests of the domestic in

stitution, the government that has fostered these measures has been cajoling the democratic party by gratifying their feelings of international jealousy and vaulting ambition. The civil war in Kansas-the growth of filibustering expeditions-the recognition of Walker's conquest of Nicaragua-the provocation given to England-are all fruits of that evil graft on American statesmanship, the nursing of a despotic democracy.

This is the great anxiety that we feel in contemplating our relations with American politicians; not the danger of the immediate crisis, which is, we trust, slight, but the increase of the discreditable species of statesmen in America who have brought the immediate crisis on. Will the present government yield up their places to men who will carry on their policy, or will the older and better type of statesmen return? Shall we again see a government elected that governs for the sake of popular power, or one that honestly spends its power, without drawing bills on the future, for the sake of good government? Will the statesmen who are most subservient to popular passion, and most cold and cruel when they once feel popular passion at their back, continue to rise above the heads of those who would sacrifice themselves to heal the civil disorders of the Republic? If so, a rupture with England, at no distant date, is, we believe, inevitable; for it seems certain that the only art by which these statesmen can retain a hold on both north and south at once, is to enlist the former on their side by an exciting external policy, and the latter by an exciting internal policy,-gratifying national ambition by a defiance of the supposed national rival, and gratifying the passions and interests of the planters by assisting the encroachments of their peculiar institution. Yet, in the worst event, there is good ground of hope that such a policy may overreach itself; for the north cannot now long continue to endure the burden of "imputed" sins laid upon it in virtue of its alliance with the south; and unless the aggressive policy is successful for a time in staving off the separation, we may soon forget all jealousies in a hearty union with the better half of a nation whose feelings of rivalry and suspicion spring mainly from a false connection.

At present, however, our only concern with the internal policy of the American government is in its bearing on their foreign relations. Yet no one can understand the latter without interpreting them by the principles which regulate the former. It is not simply that all who foster internal dissension are obliged to divert the inflammatory tendency by the appliance of external irritants. It is not merely that where the civil administration is a system of gambling, the foreign administration must be of the same kind-a sort of hedging your bet. This is not

all; for besides this there is a special relation between the policy of slavery and the policy of encroachment. The filibuster is own son to the slave-owner. The one treats feeble states as the other treats feeble races. The negro exists to be subjected; the undefended province exists to be annexed. It is assumed that these lower races and states are given moral and political life for the same reason for which animals meant for human food are given physical life,-only because vitality enables them to supply more perfectly the higher order of beings who consume them with the fibre and tissue their organisation needs. The world of nature, though given us to subdue, is conceived to be too light a nutriment for the higher races of men; rational life and political life of lower orders must be fed upon as well, in order to sustain the higher types of social organisations. A servile class and tributary states are desiderata for the completer leisure of a directing intelligence.

The anxious points about the American foreign policy are these two-this restless hunger of the democracy for new prey, and the utter slipperiness and unreliable character of the statesmen. Statesmen as aggressive and as meddling, as we may prove subsequently, England has often had; but English statesmen have never been backed by a universal popular rapacity for encroachment; and, what is more important still, English statesmen do really, we believe, feel themselves bound by both the spirit and the letter of their predecessors' pledges. They feel that England's honour is something distinct from the honour of a temporary ministry, and that, however much a system of policy may rightly change with a change of the cabinet, promises given by one administration must be scrupulously adhered to by another if foreign nations are to respect and trust the British crown. But the whole course of the late negotiations with America show that by the Pierce administration such obligations are lightly felt. The problem of foreign policy with them is to make it supplement the home policy by winning the favour of those who are indifferent or dissatisfied about their internal measures. It is impossible for any one who has studied these negotiations to believe that the American cabinet adjust their foreign relations according to their real estimate of the merits of the case on which they decide; we cannot avoid the belief that their course is mainly determined by a regard to other exigencies. It is rumoured that the President proposed, in order to avoid dismissing the English ambassador, Mr. Crampton, that the embassy should be altogether closed for the present. Whether there be truth or not in that report, we can well conceive that to the tactics of this administration the permanent residence of an English ambassador must be rather a perplexity than an