Will It Be Found That The
Americans Share With Us That Elastic Power Of Endurance Which Has
Enabled Us To Bear A Weight That Would Have Ruined Any Other People
Of The Same Number?
Have they the thews and muscles, the energy and
endurance, the power of carrying which we possess?
They have got
our blood in their veins, and have these qualities gone with the
blood? It is of little avail either to us or to the truth that we
can show some difference between our position and their position
which may seem to be in our favor. They doubtless could show other
points of difference on the other side. With us, in the early years
of this century, it was a contest for life and death, in which we
could not stop to count the cost - in which we believed that we were
fighting for all that we cared to call our own, and in which we were
resolved that we would not be beaten as long as we had a man to
fight and a guinea to spend. Fighting in this mind we won. Had we
fought in any other mind I think I may say that we should not have
won. To the Americans of the Northern States this also is a contest
for life and death. I will not here stay to argue whether this need
have been so. I think they are right; but this at least must be
accorded to them - that, having gone into this matter of civil war,
it behoves them to finish it with credit to themselves. There are
many Englishmen who think that we were wrong to undertake the French
war; but there is, I take it, no Englishman who thinks that we ought
to have allowed ourselves to be beaten when we had undertaken it.
To the Americans it is now a contest of life and death. They also
cannot stop to count the cost, They also will go on as long as they
have a dollar to spend or a man to fight.
It appears that we were paying fourteen millions a year interest on
our national debt in the year 1796. I take this statement from an
article in The Times, in which the question of the finances of the
United States is handled. But our population in 1796 was only
sixteen millions. I estimate the population of the Northern section
of the United States, as the States will be after the war, at
twenty-two millions. In the article alluded to, these Northern
Americans are now stated to be twenty millions. If then we, in
1796, could pay fourteen millions a year with a population of
sixteen millions, the United States, with a population of twenty or
twenty-two millions, will be able to pay the sixteen or seventeen
millions sterling of interest which will become due from them, if
their circumstances of payment are as good as were ours. They can
do that, and more than that, if they have the same means per man as
we had. And as the means per man resolves itself at last into the
labor per man, it may be said that they can pay what we could pay,
if they can and will work as hard as we could and did work. That
which did not crush us will not crush them, if their future energy
be equal to our past energy.
And on this question of energy I think that there is no need for
doubt. Taking man for man and million for million, the Americans
are equal to the English in intellect and industry. They create
wealth, at any rate, as fast as we have done. They develop their
resources, and open out the currents of trade, with an energy equal
to our own. They are always at work - improving, utilizing, and
creating. Austria, as I take it, is succumbing to monetary
difficulties, not because she has been extravagant, but because she
has been slow at progress; because it has been the work of her
rulers to repress rather than encourage the energies of her people;
because she does not improve, utilize, and create. England has
mastered her monetary difficulties because the genius of her
government and her people has been exactly opposite to the genius of
Austria. And the States of America will master their money
difficulties, because they are born of England, and are not born of
Austria. What! Shall our eldest child become bankrupt in its first
trade difficulty; be utterly ruined by its first little commercial
embarrassment! The child bears much too strong a resemblance to its
parent for me to think so.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE POST-OFFICE.
Any Englishman or Frenchman residing in the American States cannot
fail to be struck with the inferiority of the post-office
arrangements in that country to those by which they are accommodated
in their own country. I have not been a resident in the country,
and as a traveler might probably have passed the subject without
special remark, were it not that the service of the post-office has
been my own profession for many years. I could therefore hardly
fail to observe things which to another man would have been of no
material moment. At first I was inclined to lean heavily in my
judgment upon the deficiencies of a department which must be of
primary importance to a commercial nation. It seemed that among a
people so intelligent, and so quick in all enterprises of trade, a
well-arranged post-office would have been held to be absolutely
necessary, and that all difficulties would have been made to succumb
in their efforts to put that establishment, if no other, upon a
proper footing. But as I looked into the matter, and in becoming
acquainted with the circumstances of the post-office learned the
extent of the difficulties absolutely existing, I began to think
that a very great deal had been done, and that the fault, as to that
which had been left undone, rested not with the post-office
officials, but was attributable partly to political causes
altogether outside the post-office, and partly - perhaps chiefly - to
the nature of the country itself.
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