overbearing and peremptory state. Hear Mr. Tremenheere on this point. (Notes, p. 128.)

Raising my eyes from the daily study of these [newspapers], I was tempted to ask myself whether it was really true that I, as an Englishman, was meeting with nothing but cordiality, civility, and kindness from every one I fell in with, while probably every individual among them had just been reading, in some paper or other, the most virulent denunciations of England, the bitterest taunts against her policy, the most undervaluing remarks on her power, and the most depreciating estimates of the individual character of her people.

After a three-months' course of these papers, I think I am safe in saying that the ordinary tone of more than two-thirds of them is of that quality, whenever they take occasion to discuss any thing in which England, or English customs, or English character may be involved ; and that in a moment of the least political excitement a still larger proportion of them join in the same cry; and it then requires no ordinary courage in the editor of an American newspaper to deal out to England, or to any one of her actions, the simplest meed of fairness.

I asked very many persons what was the meaning of all this; and the answer I invariably received was, 'Oh, you must not mind what our papers say; we don't read such trash as most of them contain; it is written to catch the Irish votes at the elections.'

With all deference to my numerous and most respectable informants, I am not satisfied that this answer goes to the root of the matter.

For a solution, I think it necessary to begin with the beginning; and that beginning is, in a nation educated all on one plan, the public schools.

In the course of my visits to these schools, in the range of country I have described, I asked permission to look, among other school-books, at the books of history in common use. I looked through them all. They contain either a very brief résumé of history, both ancient and modern, or of modern alone, principally that of England; so brief, however, as to be entirely unimpressive to the minds of youth, being little more than a mere dry detail of facts and dates. The staple of these books is, as is very natural, American history, from the landing of the Puritans to the termination of the last war. The most prominent part is, as naturally, given to the history of the war of independOf the spirit of their forefathers in undertaking that war, and of their courage in bringing it to a successful issue, they have much reason to be proud. The exploits of that war, and the successful ones of the last, figure of course conspicuously in those histories. The error

ence.

* "The text-book of history now in use in our schools is not a good one. We will give an illustration of its character. In the part devoted to Grecian history, the names of Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, and Leonidas are not introduced in the narration of the Persian invasions; and the name of not a single inhabitant of Greece who lived between the time of Solon and that of Epaminondas is mentioned in the course of that part of the history. Yet this period of nearly two hundred years was prolific of great men, and is probably the most important era in the history of civilisation."-Report of the Boston Public Schools, 1849.

of the British Government and people in provoking the struggle is chastised with no sparing hand; while the power of the American people, as exhibited in beating the British Government, and the glory thence resulting, occupy a conspicuous place. As long as such histories are written in a fair and simply patriotic spirit, without seeking to perpetuate hostile feelings, and without either unjustifiable exaggerations or unfair concealments (and I cannot say that some of the books I looked at are free from such defects), no one can complain that American children should read principally American history; but a young person who has been instructed in a course of history in which a few years and a few events are made to assume such prominence, while the history of previous centuries, and of subsequent events, is all but unknown, will be apt to have very exaggerated ideas of his own nation, and a very slender one of any other."

We can well understand how those who know little of English history except at those periods where it was interwoven with that of America, and who read those periods only in works written from an American point of view, tinged with American prejudices, and expressly designed to exasperate American patriotism, should conceive of us as an arrogant, aggressive, ambitious, and intermeddling nation. We can only assure them that we are wholly altered since those days; and we can safely appeal, in proof of our reformation, to our entire history (India perhaps apart) since 1815. Our sin and our danger now lie in a precisely opposite direction. Not only have we become indolent, forbearing, and enduring; willing to compromise and anxious to accommodate; hating the trouble of dispute, and dreading both the cost, the folly, and the sin of war; but our national policy has been of late, and is still, too largely influenced by a school or party which holds that isolation is our true wisdom, that a nation has no duties towards other nations, and that we ought to stand tamely by in selfish or sublime indifference, whatever tricks are played or whatever atrocities are committed on the earth. If we err in future, it will not be by meddling too often, but by abstaining from meddling even when abstinence becomes a crime. If we come into collision with our neighbours, it will not be from a wish to dictate, but from the inevitable necessity of at last resisting dictation. The temper of the nation is greatly altered: it is in some respects wiser, in some respects weaker. Nothing short of the unbending arrogance and the undisguised aggressiveness of Russia could have dragged us into this war; nothing short of equally offensive behaviour on the part of some other state will drag us into war again. We now habitually only long for peace to lead a quiet life-to keep out of hot water. We ask only of our neighbours-and of our American neighbours most especially-that they will not, by unendurable encroach

ments or inadmissible pretensions, bully us out of our indolent

repose.

Unfortunately the prejudices which history has raised against us are perpetually confirmed and fanned by the Europeans who annually flock by thousands to the New World. The voices of the living echo and reiterate the false accusations of the dead. America now reckons among her population vast numbers who are Americans neither by birth, descent, nor feeling,-who are in her, but not of her, who disregard her interests, abuse her hospitality, and bring discredit on her character. In virtue of the unbounded liberality of her customs, the settled freedom of her institutions, and the rich rewards which she offers to industry and enterprise, she has for nearly two generations been the refuge of adventurers from every portion of the Old World. The active and the striving saw in her a field where their energies would be secure of wealth and greatness; the depressed and despairing flocked to a land where success was possible and hope was reasonable; the loving fled to her as a country where marriage would be feasible, and where children would be a help and not a burden; the discontented sought her as a land of promise; the tossed and persecuted, as a place of rest; adventurers of every character and of every sort of antecedents,-those who had made Europe too hot to hold them,-those who had quitted it because it was too sober for their wild dreams and too strong for their meditated crimes; fugitives from tyranny, fugitives from justice;-all these crowded to the great republic of the New World, and found there a ready welcome, or at least a hospitable shelter and an unsuspicious and uninquiring home.

Among this miscellany two classes are especially noticeable -the immigrants from Central Europe and the immigrants from Ireland. For some time back each of these classes has numbered on an average upwards of 100,000 annually, and each, with its descendants, is calculated now to reach about two millions. Thus, out of a total white population of twenty millions, four consist of aliens,-men who are not naturalised at heart into their adopted country,-who are still rather Irish, or Germans, than United-States men,-who yet cherish all the prejudices and passions they brought with them from the land of their extraction,-and who are, in truth, almost as anti-American as they are anti-English. A considerable proportion of the Germans belonged to the political malcontents of their native land; who had long sighed for a liberty which they could not attain; who had been worsted in their endeavours to overthrow or to reform their oppressive governments at home; who, in fact, constituted the Republicans, Socialists, and revolutionary party generally, in the various states of Central Europe. Most

of these had imbibed, before they crossed the Atlantic, a thorough distrust and dislike of England-often with little reasonable ground. She had disappointed their expectations. They had looked to her, as the one great free state in Europe, for aid, or at least for sympathy, in their various insurrectionary movements; they had flattered themselves that they were certain of obtaining it; they had deceived themselves, or had suffered their leaders to deceive them, into a belief that it had been first promised and then withheld; and they resented the disappointment of their unwarranted hopes, as if a positive engagement had been broken and a positive injury inflicted. We need not tell Englishmen, nor any one who knows the strong clinging of the English government to the established and the legitimate, how entirely baseless, in nearly every instance, were these self-deceiving hopes. But, nevertheless, they were firmly held by thousands of insurgents throughout Europe, who first settled in their own minds what Great Britain ought to do; then persuaded themselves that she would do it; and finally hated her because she had not done it. There can be no question that England is, and has long been, in sad disrepute with the popular party on the Continent; and that those belonging to it, who have crossed the Atlantic in consequence of the ruin of their hopes, have carried their animosity against us along with them, and preach it as a creed in their new country.

Of the sentiments towards England which the Irish immigrants have carried with them into the United States it is needless to speak. The names of Meagher and Mitchell are sufficient. The Hibernian detestation of the British government dates far back in history. It partook of all the elements of discord which could fan a sentiment into a passion-animosity of conquest and defeat, animosity of race, animosity of politics, animosity of religion. The perverse and apparently innate lawlessness of the Irish no doubt made it a matter of enormous difficulty to govern them at once mildly and effectively. Unhappily, too, for generations we did neither. Our government was undeniably oppressive and unjust. Our laws, as regarded Catholics, were intolerant and iniquitous in the extreme. There was ample warrant for Irish hatred of the British government. But the feeling survived-as was inevitable-long after its causes and its justification had been removed. The fairest government, the kindest treatment, the most equal laws, the most unbounded and generous aid in time of calamity, have done nothing to appease a hatred which at last became at once criminal and insane. Politicians, who had neither patriotism to inspire them, nor wisdom to guide them, nor Christianity to restrain them, found gratification for their passions and hope for

their ambition in exasperating to the utmost the blind fury of the poor and ignorant, and giving to the hatred between Celt and Saxon the deadly and incurable character of an hostility of race. Hundreds of thousands of these misled unfortunates perished in the famine, in spite of the most gigantic and generous efforts of English humanity to save them. Hundreds of thousands more flocked to America, and flock there yearly still-disturbing their adopted country with their incorrigible turbulence, inflaming it by their wild passions, misleading it by their insané delusions, and spreading through the length and breadth of the land mental and moral poison of the most subtle and degrading kind.

Unfortunately, too, the institutions and customs of the United States give great facilities to both these classes of aliens to influence the conduct and excite the feelings of their new country. Naturalisation is casily obtained, sometimes after a short residence, sometimes with scarcely any residence at all. In a land where suffrage, nearly universal, every where prevails, immigrants soon become voters, and as such are sought for, flattered, and cajoled by politicians of every party; their support is bid for; their prejudices are humoured or adopted; and the ambitious and unscrupulous candidates for place, or power, or senatorial distinctions, are soon made aware that a profession of the most rabid hostility to Great Britain is the surest mode of securing Irish and sometimes German votes. Rancorous Hibernian orators rave at public meetings and on forest "stumps ;" and it is well known that, of all the outrageous and virulent abuse of England which so disfigures the American press, nearly one-half proceeds from Irish pens, and the other half is a disreputable and dishonest pandering to the exigencies of Irish passion. It must be set down either to a populace whom Irish lies have perverted, or to politicians to whom Irish votes are necessary.

All this is well understood and deeply regretted by the respectable and sound-hearted of the Americans themselves. They are deeply concerned and bitterly indignant at seeing their country's name thus taken in vain, their country's policy distorted and misdirected, their country's energies wasted and turned astray, and their country's reputation lowered and stained, by foreigners whose designs they see through and whose character they despise. The basis of the great "Know-Nothing" party is a conviction of the necessity of shaking off this low and ignominious foreign yoke, if the name of America is to be respected among nations, and if American citizenship is henceforth to be a title of honour and a word of trust.

So much for the causes which have led America to misunderstand Great Britain. Those which lead to a corresponding mis