But As I Have Said, It Is Not Specially Interesting To The Eye;
What New Town, Or Even What Simply Adult Town, Can Be So?
There is
an Atheneum, and a State Hall, and a fashionable street, - Beacon
Street, very like Piccadilly as it runs along the Green Park, - and
there is the Green Park opposite to this Piccadilly, called Boston
Common.
Beacon Street and Boston Common are very pleasant.
Excellent houses there are, and large churches, and enormous
hotels; but of such things as these a man can write nothing that is
worth the reading. The traveler who desires to tell his experience
of North America must write of people rather than of things.
As I have said, I found myself instantly involved in discussions on
American politics and the bearing of England upon those politics.
"What do you think, you in England - what do you believe will be the
upshot of this war?" That was the question always asked in those
or other words. "Secession, certainly," I always said, but not
speaking quite with that abruptness. "And you believe, then, that
the South will beat the North?" I explained that I personally had
never so thought, and that I did not believe that to be the general
idea. Men's opinions in England, however, were too divided to
enable me to say that there was any prevailing conviction on the
matter. My own impression was, and is, that the North will, in a
military point of view, have the best of the contest - will beat the
South; but that the Northerners will not prevent secession, let
their success be what it may. Should the North prevail after a two
years' conflict, the North will not admit the South to an equal
participation of good things with themselves, even though each
separate rebellious State should return suppliant, like a prodigal
son, kneeling on the floor of Congress, each with a separate rope
of humiliation round its neck. Such was my idea as expressed then,
and I do not know that I have since had much cause to change it.
"We will never give it up," one gentleman said to me - and, indeed,
many have said the same - "till the whole territory is again united
from the Bay to the Gulf. It is impossible that we should allow of
two nationalities within those limits." "And do you think it
possible," I asked, "that you should receive back into your bosom
this people which you now hate with so deep a hatred, and receive
them again into your arms as brothers on equal terms? Is it in
accordance with experience that a conquered people should be so
treated, and that, too, a people whose every habit of life is at
variance with the habits of their presumed conquerors? When you
have flogged them into a return of fraternal affection, are they to
keep their slaves or are they to abolish them?" "No," said my
friend, "it may not be practicable to put those rebellious States
at once on an equality with ourselves.
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