Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848

AMERICAN THOUGHTS ON EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS

A thousand leagues of ocean, my Basil, are indeed between us, but it is no longer right to reckon distances by leagues. Time is your only measure. I know of a gentleman who had a home in Paris, while Paris was capable of homes, and he came every year across the Atlantic, only to fish for trout. Why do you stare? You know very well that you have often waited a fortnight for a good day to go a-fishing. Come, then, pack up your slender reed, and spend such a fortnight in a steamer. By God's favour you shall be the better for sea air; and in two weeks from Liverpool, you shall find yourself on the shores of a lake in the interior of the State of New York, where, since the fifth day of the creation, the trout have apparently been multiplying in a manner that would astonish a Malthus. Such is now that dissociable ocean, which was once thought too great a waste of waters to be passed by colonial members of parliament representing the provinces of America. "Opposuit Natura;" said Burke, "I cannot remove the eternal barriers of the creation." But Burke forgot his Greek: —

"Πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ, κοὐδεν ανθρώπου δεινότερον πελει·τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νοτῳ χωρεί, περιβρυχίοισι περῶν ἐρ' oἴδμασι·"

I know it is an old saw, but it is so freshened by the modern instance of steamers every week, that it has become quotable once more; and I have almost a mind to go on with the chorus, and show that Sophocles may be fairly rendered in favour of railways and iron-steeds. But the telegraph, Basil! I must even quote a bit of English for that. As gentle Cowper saith: —

The wires are already stretched from Massachusetts, and almost from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. A spark here, and the lettered bulletin is reeling off in Louisiana! The fresh news will, hereafter, be hawked in the streets of Boston and along the wharves of New Orleans in the same hour. It will soon be sent farther still; and a British fleet in the Pacific may be served with orders from the Admiralty Board, not two weeks old. We are fairly in hand-shaking neighbourhood. I remember when European intelligence came to us rather as history than as news. It is not so now. While emotion is yet warm with you, it sets our own hearts throbbing. We, too, are, in the present tense, with Europe; for the revolutions of peace have been more wonderful than those of warfare. They have reunited what strife had sundered, and rendered England and America again one family.

Talking of revolutions, – how hot the noon of the century is growing! You will allow, dear Basil, that we in America, are well situated to be lookers on. With all the security of distance, we have the advantages of nearness. You are on the stage – we are in the boxes. You go behind the scenes, and see the wire-working and machinery, but we get the effect of the spectacle. The great revolutionary drama is before us, and we can behold it calmly; interested, but not involved. For a devout or philosophical spectator, America is the true observatory. Here we can watch "the great Babel, and not feel the crowd." It is our own fault if, with such advantages, we do not anticipate the judgment of future ages, and arrive instinctively at conclusions which those who share the tumult itself must ordinarily learn in the soberness of after-thoughts, or, perhaps, by a dear experience.

Did you ask how the doings in France appear in republican eyes? And pray what do you expect me to answer? You appear to think republicanism a specific instead of a generic term, and to expect us to hail the French as our kindred. As well might I suppose that your monarchical sympathies deeply interest you in the autocracy of Dahomey and Dârfur. A boy may play with a monkey, without admiring him; and although the monkey is a biped without feathers, the boy would not like to have him taken for a younger brother. Believe me, we are not yet ready to claim fraternity with the Provisional Government. How we apples swim, seems to be their salutation to America; but, for one, I reject the odorous impeachment. No one is very cordial, as yet, in returning it. There is a general gaping and staring; but the prevailing disposition towards France is to wait and see if she will be decent. You will agree with me, that this caution is creditable to the Model Republic.

In the spectacle before us, believe me, then, we know how to distinguish the harlequin from the hero, and are not in danger of clapping hands at the buffoonery of Paris, when we have just been charmed by the solemn buskin in which London came upon the stage – reluctant to play her part, but prepared to go through it nobly. A French melodrama, of men in smocks chanting Mourir pour la Patrie, or priests, in defiled surplices, asperging and incensing May-poles, must of course suit the tastes of the groundlings; but such inexplicable dumb-shows are generally understood to be only the prelude to something tragic that is coming. For one, I look for solemn monologues from Pio Nono and Lamartine; and, by-and-by, expect a scene between the Soldan and the Czar. I do not look without feelings of awe, for I am sure it is the shadow of God's own hand that is now passing over the nations. It is He that says, as of old, "remove the diadem and take off the crown; exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high." I am glad that others recognise his footsteps in the earth, and therefore was pleased with that motto lately quoted in Maga, from St Augustine – "God is patient, because He is eternal."

For seventeen years we have been watching the great political Humpty-Dumpty, in his efforts to come to an equilibrium, and to stand firm in his place; and the end is, that Humpty-Dumpty is fallen, according to the oracular rhyme of Mother Goose. What shall we say of him, except that he was barricaded in, and has been barricaded out? Laugh as we may at the undefinableness of legitimacy, one feels that the lack of it makes a great difference in our disposition towards a discrowned king. Still, Louis-Philippe is treated with much forbearance, and men think of his hoar hairs and his eventful life. In one of our newspapers, a generous word has been spoken for his government, as about the best that France deserved, and his best measures have been reviewed with praise. Still, he is much disliked in America. One of his earliest Claremonts was with us; and when Lafayette made him a king, Americans felt as if they had a right to be pleased with his accession. But his quarrel with his benefactor turned the feeling strongly against him, for Lafayette was revered among us to the hour of his death. I think there is a general satisfaction with the fall of the Orleans dynasty; but it certainly has not been malicious or spiteful. An eminent American, who has lived long in Paris, has written two letters in the leading democratic newspaper of New York, in which the fallen monarch is more severely handled than he has been elsewhere. He is there said to be a much overrated man – possessed of no great talents, except those which enable him to dissimulate with the utmost cunning, and to manage with the basest perfidy. The writer, nevertheless, has no confidence in the revolution as having destroyed the monarchy; and quotes with approbation a sentiment which he says was advanced in conversation with himself, so long ago as 1830, by Odillon Barrot, – "Enfin, monsieur, la France a besoin de se sentir gouvernée." He thinks two things will work against the Duc de Bordeaux – that he has married an Austrian, and grown fat; yet he confidently predicts that Henry V. will one day ascend the throne of his ancestors. "As for a republic that is to go on harmoniously, and with any thing like tolerable quiet, law, and order," he concludes, "I hold it to be just as impracticable as it would be to set up a Doge of Venice and a Council of Ten in the State of New York. We hear only the voices of the revolutionists, the rest of the nation being temporarily mute. The day will come, however, when the last will speak."

These sentiments are not singular among us. I am agreeably surprised by the great moderation of our people and of our press. When the tidings of the outbreak reached us, it produced excitement, of course; but there was no echo of the French howl, and remarkably little enthusiasm, all things considered. You have seen reprinted in England some of the most foolish things that were said in our most worthless prints. The press in general behaved with great reserve and caution. Successive steamers brought continual abatements to the degree of confidence, or hope, that had been inspired in the minds of the more ardent; and so general was the candour of the newspapers, that when those of the Clay party were pettishly accused of a sympathy with tyranny, the charge was easily met by quotations from democratic newspapers, equally liable to the imputation, if a manly reprobation of revolutionary misrule and excess be sufficient to prove it. The truth is, our country was caught in the trap in 1792. Then, the pulpit and the press strove together in glorifying France; and the remorse and burning shame that were the consequence, have left a very salutary impression.

In fact, the violent democracy of Paris is exerting a beneficial effect upon our people. We see the degrading spectacle, and learn to value ourselves for a love of law and order. There is a reluctance to reduce ourselves to the level of such a republic as has sprung up like a mushroom in a night, and is likely to perish in the same way. Our own revolution was not one of drunken riot, and street-singing blouse-men: our constitution is not a mere poetical theory of liberty and equality, nor a socialist's dream of brotherhood. We now learn the secret of our strength, and of that comparative durability which has almost surprised ourselves. We are, after all, a transplanted slip of old England; nor are we so essentially changed, my Basil, as even you imagine. The spirit of our people is indeed democratic; but the spirit of our constitution is imbued with a stronger element. The facts concerning it will enable you to see one secret of our comparative success, and to judge whether France can possibly come to any thing as good. The founders of this republic were not Frenchmen, but Englishmen; I mean they were of English stock, and had learned all their notions of liberty from the history of England. Each province of America had taken shape under the British constitution; and when the provinces became independent, the general government was organised in such wise as to supply the place of that constitution. Its founders did not frame a new and untried constitution, a priori, according to their own schemes; they simply modified the great principles of British constitutional law to suit a new state of things, and a peculiar people. A monarchy was out of the question; but they did not intend to make a democracy. They only made a republic. The democratic spirit came in with Jefferson and French politics at the beginning of the present century. It has become dominant, but by no means triumphant; and its great obstacle has been the constitution. In the several states it has changed the constitutions one after the other, introducing universal suffrage, and other democratic features. But the national constitution has not been so easily reached; and it is the strength of the great party with which Clay and Webster are identified, and which is a constant check on the popular party. It is republican, but not simply democratic. The executive magistracy is elective; but the electors are not the people, directly, but electoral colleges, appointed by the several states; and the office itself is endowed with prerogatives, some of which are more unlimited than the corresponding rights of the British crown. Our senate is a mere modification of the House of Lords: it is a body more select than the lower house, and not so immediately responsible to constituents; and its practical working shows the great importance of such a balance-wheel in any government. There is no working without it, in spite of what your Roebucks may say. The House of Commons reappears in our House of Representatives, which, like its great original, is the safety-valve of popular feeling, and gives sonorous vent to a mighty pressure of steam and vapour, which would otherwise blow us to atoms, with a much less endurable noise. The whole fabric of our law is a precious patrimony derived, with our blood, from England. Our new states are filling up with emigrants from the continent of Europe, but they all adopt the law of their older sisters; and thus the institutions of the immortal Alfred may be found among the Swedes and Danes of Wisconsin. These, then, are the elements of our strength; and you observe they partake of the strength of the British empire, which has been legitimately and naturally imparted to us, like the mother's life-blood to the daughter of her womb. We have indeed characteristic peculiarities. We have tried some new experiments; but let not France suppose she can imitate them. We are a new country, a sparse population, and our people have their heads full of subduing the soil, and setting water-wheels in streams, and making roads and canals. We have no natural taste for insurrection and confusion, for we have nobody that is idle enough to want such work. Our new wine, then, has been put into new bottles; and the fool that attempts to decant it into the old vessels of Europe, will ruin it and them together.

Our newspapers have pointed out another secret of our strength, which France cannot possibly enjoy. In spite of that wild prophecy of Lady Hester Stanhope to Lamartine – so much of which has come true – Paris is France, and will be France while France holds together. The city of Washington is not America; and its great acres of unoccupied building lots are the best thing about it. The State governments, which could not have been planned beforehand, but are a natural product of old events – which dispose of all local matters, and prevent sectional jealousies, which divide and balance power, and satisfy small ambition, – these are the helps, without which our national existence could not have been prolonged beyond the lifetime of Washington himself. The threatened disturbance of the admirable equilibrium which has heretofore been maintained between North and South, and East and West, by the introduction of Mexican and Texan states, and the power which it will throw into the hands of a few persons at the seat of government, is even now our most alarming danger. We know, from what we see among ourselves, that governments must take form, not from human devices, but from God's providences. We ourselves are the results of circumstances: no scheming patriot could have made us what we are; and no imitative Frenchman can give to his country a government like ours; nor, if he could, would it survive beyond the lifetime of some individual, whose popularity would supply a temporary strength to its essential weakness. An imported constitution must be a sickly one, in any country on earth.

For us, then, there is a legitimacy in our institutions which makes them durable, and dear to all classes of our people. But to be loyal to our own republic is by no means to be committed to universal republicanism, far less to be delighted with universal anarchy. You must pardon our tastes. We are young, and we think a jacket and shako becoming. We wear our appropriate costume as gracefully as we can. We are yet the growing, perhaps the awkward, but still the active boy. But when Europe befools itself, in its dotage, with republican attire, we lads have a right to laugh. It will do for us to play leap-frog, or cut any other caper that we choose; but who can restrain derision when corpulent imbecility assumes an unskirted coat, and submits its uncovered proportions to hootings and to kicks, or throws a ponderous summersault that less demonstrates agility than exposes nakedness!

I speak for myself, and for many, very many of my countrymen. Our mere populace are of course possessed with the idea that a universal Yankee-doodle is the panacea for all the miseries of the world. It has been told them so often by demagogues, that they are pardonable. But even they would probably allow that the Chinese, for instance, are not yet quite ready for liberty-poles and ballet-boxes, and by degrees might be brought to confess as much for any country less remarkable and astonishing than our own. But there is a solid mass of good sense among us that is not so deceived. It consists of those who would rejoice to see a rational republic in France, or in any other country; but who know that, with the exception perhaps of Holland, such a thing is impossible, and that, in France, reason is more likely to reappear as the divinified harlot of Notre Dame than in any more respectable form. As to Great Britain, even our schoolboys have learned that, with all the stability of empire, it unites the freedom of a republic; and in spite of some feeling against John Bull, I scarcely know the man who would not be sorry to see it suddenly or violently revolutionised. On Irish affairs opinion is not so sane among us. Few of us know any thing about them; and for the sake of the starving peasantry of Ireland, there is some sympathy with its turbulent Gracchi. Believe it, the general tone of sentiment on this side the Atlantic, among reflecting men, is far more conservative than you imagine. Indeed, all classes stand amazed at the democracy of Europe. Our wildest enthusiasts are outdone, even by some who sit in the House of Commons; and the rampant socialism of Paris is as unlike the worst excesses of our elections, as the ferocity of a tiger is unlike the playfulness of a kitten. Young as we are, we are better mannered; and I must say, dear Basil, that when the older nations of the world are allowing themselves such license, we have a right to regard ourselves as taking new rank, and deserving more credit than has heretofore been given us, as, after all, a law-loving and law-maintaining people.

You will say, as was said to the trumpeter in Æsop – "No, no, – you make all the mischief; others cut throats, but you have set them on." But is the democratic spirit really of American origin? Our Plymouth orators – the men who annually glorify our earliest colonists – usually trace it to the Puritans, and through them to Geneva. At all events, it now infects the world, and those are the happy and the permanent governments which are prepared for its violence, by constitutional vents and floodgates. It is not to be stifled, or dammed up. We believe, therefore, that our own government is the best for ourselves, and few of us have any fear for that of England. On British matters we do not feel bound to judge by our own experiences. We are free to theorise on broader principles; and many of us form our own opinions, not as cool and critical foreigners, but as having a deep interest in the preservation of the institutions of our ancestors. Why should we not? The study of history carries us, at once, beyond the narrow limits of threescore years and ten, which is the age of our national existence, and as soon as we pass that boundary we too are Britons. The blood of our forefathers ran in English veins, or flowed for British freedom and sovereignty. This fact is enough to make our educated and reflecting men speculatively conservative as to British politics. We know the past, and do not feel the party-heats of the present in England. Hence I am far from being alone among my countrymen, in looking at English matters with an English heart. Even our commercial class have a reason for wishing internal peace and prosperity to England; and I believe there is generally something better than selfishness in the prevalent good-will toward her. I wish you could have watched, as I did, the feelings of our whole people, while lately, between the arrivals of two steamers, there was a solemn feeling of surprise as to what would be the results of the Chartist demonstration! Till the news came, the stoutest of us held our breath. I assure you, Basil, the peril of England was observed with a deep anxiety. During all that time I met not a respectable man who wished to see a revolutionary result. It was the talk of all circles. Our merchants trembled for England; our scholars hoped for her; a clerical gentleman assured me that he daily prayed for her. The press very generally predicted a triumph of order, but there were some specimens of newspaper literature that ventured an opposite augury. I wish you could have seen this city when the result was known. The news was received with a thrill. There was some laughing at the parturient mountain and the still-born mouse, but a graver cheerfulness was the reigning emotion. We deeply felt that, by the mercy of God, the world had been spared from a conflagration which the match of a madman could light, but which only another deluge could extinguish. For one, I was as a watcher by the sea-side, who, after a night of tempest, waits for the fog to rise, and then thanks God to see the good old ship coming home, in season, her masts all standing, and her flag untorn.

I had felt fears, my Basil. What was not imaginable, when Europe presented the appearance of a table on which empires had fallen in a day, like card-houses blown down by the breath of children! I knew that neither France, nor Prussia, nor Austria, nor Italy, were any thing like England, which is founded on a rock, and knit together by joints and bands: but I felt that England is no longer what she was. With a Whig government she is never herself.5 The Whigs are more than half Frenchmen. I tell you you seem to me not half enough afraid of your Whigs; they are worse than your Radicals. You show some uneasiness under the Jewish Disabilities Bill, but I wish you could see it as it strikes a looker-on. If time has on you the effect which distance has on me, you will yet look back on that measure as you now look back on the great mistake of 1829. It will haunt you like a nightmare, and you will regard it with less of anger than of shame and remorse; with the deep conviction that, if the friends of the constitution had done their duty, it never would have disgraced a Christian state. True, the Whigs are responsible for inflicting the blow; but what has been done to avert it? So far as I know, nothing commensurate with the greatness of the evil. You seem to give way to it as only one of many inroads upon old proprieties, which are inevitable, and cannot be withstood. But is the unchristianising of the state to be spoken of side by side with even the destruction of colonies, and the discouragement of agriculture? As it strikes me, it is not a thing of a class, it stands out a portent, a harbinger, a phenomenon of its own kind. Not that it surprises me. From Lord John Russell nothing that argues fatuity and lack of political principle should surprise any one. To carry out the plans to which he has committed himself, he must consistently pander to infidels, foster heretics, and subsidise Jews. To the reforms of the last score of years, there could be no more fitting sequel than this coalition with a people loaded with the hereditary burthen of the saving blood of the Crucified. I only marvel that the bill goes on so slowly. The Baron should have been long since in his place, and the Easter holidays should have been disregarded, out of respect to his feelings. It is astonishing that he is not already an ecclesiastical commissioner. The times are not now as during a former French revolution, when a British statesman could say6– "the Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury." You are always praising your church, Basil, but allow me to ask, Why you may not live to see a Jewish rabbi nominated to a bishopric. As I understand it, the obsequious chapter would be obliged to perform the election, and close all by anthems to Almighty God, ascribing to Him the glory of a gift so felicitous and so auspicious to the church! It would not be the first time, I believe, that Lord John has set the Te Deum of cathedrals going, like the whistles of a juggler's barrel-organ. Forgive me, Basil; I am not mocking the agonies of your church, but I am scorning a British minister that can use for her destruction the powers confided to him for her nourishment and defence. I have learned my notions of your politics from Edmund Burke, and I remember what he said in his Reflections on the French Revolution of 1792– for, by the way, revolutions in France must be always referred to by dates, and will soon be known, like policemen, by letters and numbers. "The men of England," said that great and honest man, "the men I mean of light and leading in England, would be ashamed, as of a silly deceitful trick, to profess any religion in name which, by their proceedings, they appear to contemn." Does not Lord John profess to be a Christian? I must caution you, too, against supposing that I dislike the Israelites. Far from it. In my own country I am glad that they labour under no disabilities, and I can testify to their good order, decency, and propriety of behaviour as citizens. But we have "no past at our back," and nothing in our system which demands a prior consideration. No, Basil – I honour a Jew, however much I may pity him. Crying old clothes, or lolling in a banker's chariot, the Jew is to me a man of sacred associations. And then – a Jewish gentleman – he makes me think at once of the sons of Maccabæus and all the Asmoneans; those Hebrews of the Hebrews, those Tories of Israel! What natural sympathy has a Jewish gentleman with a Whig? Were I merely covetous of votes I would say – let the Jews in! I could trust their conscience; I could appeal to their own feelings; I would put it to them whether their liberalism would consent to eat pork with the Gentiles, or to call in the uncircumcised to make laws for the synagogue. We pity the blindness of the Jews that offered their thirty pieces of silver – but we do not despise them. Our contempt settles on the head of the Christian who consented to take them at the bargain.