SOCIETY, MANNERS AND POLITICS
IN THE
UNITED STATES:
BEING A
SERIES OF LETTERS ON NORTH AMERICA.

BY MICHAEL CHEVALIER.

TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD PARIS EDITION.

BOSTON:
WEEKS, JORDAN AND COMPANY.
1839.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1839,
By Weeks, Jordan & Co.
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.

TUTTLE, DENNETT AND CHISHOLM'S
POWER PRESS,
No. 17 School Street, Boston.

[NOTICE.]

M. Chevalier was sent to this country in 1834, under the patronage of Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, in France, to inspect our public works. But attracted by the novel spectacle presented by society in the United States, he extended the time of his stay and the sphere of his observations amongst us, and spent two years in visiting nearly all parts of the Union, and studying the workings of our social and political machinery. His letters give the results of his observations, the impressions made on his mind, his speculations in regard to the future destiny of our institutions, rather than a detailed narrative of facts and events, which, however, is introduced when necessary for illustration or proof. The translator is not, of course, to be considered responsible for all the opinions and statements of the original; but it will be found, in his judgment, that M. Chevalier has studied with diligence and sagacity, drawn his conclusions with caution and discrimination, and stated his views in a clear, forcible, and interesting manner. He seems to be perfectly free from any narrowness or prejudice, ready to recognise whatever is good or of good tendency, whether in character, manners, modes of life, political and social institutions, habits, or opinions, without regard to mere personal likes and dislikes; and to be equally frank in condemning, whenever he perceives, in our practices, a violation of our own principles, or of those of an enlightened philosophy. He tells many home truths to all parties and classes. Some passages of the letters and many of the notes, which have no particular interest in this country, have been omitted. M. Chevalier's work has been very favourably received in his own country, where it has passed through several editions.

T. G. Bradford.

Boston, October, 1839.

[CONTENTS.]

[NOTES AT THE END OF THE VOLUME.]

LETTERS ON NORTH AMERICA.

[INTRODUCTION.]

1. That form of civilization which has prevailed among the European nations, has moved, in its march over the globe, from east to west. From its cradles in the depths of old Asia and Upper Egypt, it advanced, by successive stages, to the shores of the Atlantic, along which it spread itself from the southern point of Spain to the northern extremity of the British Isles and the Scandinavian peninsula. It seemed to have here reached its goal when Christopher Columbus showed it the way to the New World. At each stage it has taken up a new faith, new manners, new laws, new customs, a different language, dress, and food, different modes of life, public and private. The great questions touching the relation of man to God, to his fellows, and to the universe, and domestic, social, and political order, which had all been solved at the beginning of the halt, were, after a while, brought again into discussion, and then civilization, starting again on her march, has moved onward toward the west, to give them a new solution.

This stream, setting from the east toward the west, is formed by the junction of two others flowing from the two great Bible races of Japhet and Shem; which, coming from the north and the south, meet and mingle together, and are replenished from their respective sources, during each period of our civilization, through all the episodes, which obstruct and chequer this majestic pilgrimage. By turns, each of these forces, whose combined action constitutes the motive power that carries mankind forward in its course, has been overborne by the other. Thence it is, that our civilization, instead of advancing in a straight line from east to west, has swerved in its march, either from the north toward the south, or from the south toward the north, taking a winding and devious course, and gathering up, by turns, purer drops from the blood of Shem or of Japhet. There has been, however, this difference between the North and the South; that the South has most often acted upon the North by sending to it the germs of civilization, without overrunning it with a new race; while the North has awakened the slumbering civilization of the South by pouring over it swarms of hardy barbarians, audax Japeti genus. Thus is fulfilled the great prophecy concerning Japhet, that "he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."

2. Independent of our civilization and distinct from it, there is another in the furthest East, whose centre is China, and whose outposts are Japan, and which embraces its hundreds of millions of men. It moves in a direction contrary to our own, from west to east, and its locomotive powers are slight; we might compare the respective speed of these two civilizations to the two great revolutions of the globe, the annual revolution in its orbit, and that which gives rise to the precession of the equinoxes. This oriental civilization, like that of the west, has repeatedly regenerated itself by a new mixture of the man of the North with the man of the South. The race of Japhet, which gave us our Barbarians, and, before the Barbarians, had given us the Pelasgians, Scythians, Celts, and Thracians, and has since given us the Turks and Sclavonians, has also furnished the East with its Mongols and Manchus. The family of Genghis Khan, which conquered the East, also pushed its victorious hordes, at the same time, to the Rhine.

The Eastern civilization, less active and less easily set in motion than the Western, probably because it has not enough of the blood of Shem, and has too much of that of the inferior races, has not risen to the same degree of improvement with its sister. But we must do it the justice to confess, that to it belongs the honor of several capital inventions and discoveries, such as the mariners' compass, printing, and gunpowder, on which we pride ourselves; and we must moreover acknowledge that it has solved the problem, to keep under one law, for an indefinite number of ages, a population greater than that of all Europe. The Roman empire, whose population was less than that of China, stood whole only three hundred years. The spiritual authority of the Pope extended over less territory than that of the Roman empire, and was absolutely acknowledged only from Charlemagne to Luther.

3. The two civilizations, thus gathered together at the two extremities of the old continent, and turning their backs upon each other, were separated by an immense space before the western had fixed itself in America; now, more than half the intervening distance is passed; Mexico and South America are covered with offsets from the latter, on the side which looks toward Asia, as well as on that which fronts us: the United States cannot long delay to extend themselves from sea to sea; the Islands of the South Sea are beginning to be peopled by Europeans. From this point of view, it is clear that America, placed between the two civilizations, is reserved for high destinies, and that the progress of population in the New World is a matter of the deepest interest to the whole human race.

The connecting of the two civilizations is certainly the broadest subject that can occupy the human mind; it is, in the eyes of the friend of man, an event of all others most big with hope. It embraces, politically, the association of all peoples, the balance of the world, of which the balance of Europe is only a part; in religion, the whole law of the human family, the true catholicism: morally, the most harmonious reciprocal action of the two opposite natures, which divide each race, each sex, each people, and each family, and which are typified in the Bible by Cain and Abel; intellectually, the complete encyclopædia and the universal language; industrially, a definite plan for developing the resources of the globe. In our time this question is no longer merely speculative; it is now something more than merely food for the dreams of philosophers; it should be the subject of the meditations of statesmen.

Since the age of Louis XIV., the merchants, who are the pioneers of state policy, have striven with a constantly increasing ardor, to open relations with China, because they have felt the importance of a regular system of exchanges between Europe and a mass of two hundred million of producers and consumers. The emancipation of North America, and quite lately the abolition of the English East India Company's monopoly, have given to the efforts of commerce an irresistible force; before this power, the laws which close up the celestial empire are nothing. China is encircled, on the south, by the English and their tributaries; on the north, by the Cossacks, the van-guard of Russia; British and American fleets prowl along her coasts; the sleepy Spaniards of Mexico and the Philippines think of the days of the galleons, and keep their half-opened eyes fixed upon her. The human race has just come into possession of new means of communication, which shorten distance in an unexpected degree. The two civilizations will soon reach each other and mingle together; it will be the greatest event in the history of man.

4. Before the art of navigation was brought to perfection, before Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, Europe had had communications with China through the medium of the Arabs, independently of the caravans which traversed Central Asia. The Arabs, conquerors and missionaries placed between the two civilizations, had spread themselves by turns toward the East and the West. That people, so active by starts, has been to the East the messenger of the West, and to the West, the courier and factor of the East. Unhappily since the Western civilization has shone with the greatest brilliancy in Europe, Arabia has flung out but feeble gleams of light; since Providence has filled us with a devouring activity, the Arabians are fallen into a deep lethargy; on that side, therefore, the intercourse, which was never complete nor speedy, has almost ceased. But if, as some suppose, the Arab race is about to rouse itself from its long stupor, at the voice and by the aid of Europe, the latter will then have a powerful ally in its efforts to seize and hold Asia, or to transmit to her the means of working out her own restoration, and this illustrious race will thus contribute essentially to the marriage of the two civilizations.

5. Our civilization, in its march westward, has sometimes turned back towards the East; thus it has had its Argonauts, its Agamemnons, and its Alexanders, and more lately its heroes of the crusades and its Portuguese captains. These partial movements were but temporary interruptions of its solemn march toward the West; they were merely countercurrents, resembling the eddies which always exist in the currents of rivers. Until our own time, Europe has founded no durable and important establishment in Asia; in proportion as our civilization advanced westwards, the countries which it left behind escaped from its influence, and the distance between it and the oriental civilization, became greater. Alexander is the only person of whom China could feel any fear, and he passed away like the lightning flash. The Parthians, the Saracens, or the Turks, were the impregnable bulwarks of eastern Asia. The mission of Europe was, above all things, to reach and settle a new hemisphere.

At present, the incontestible superiority of the western nations in wealth, in mechanical skill, in means of transportation, in government, in the art of war, enables them to make their way across the Old World toward the remotest recesses of Asia. The nations whom we are accustomed to call oriental, but who are only inhabitants of the Lesser East, have ceased to be formidable adversaries to Europe; they delivered up their swords, at Heliopolis, Navarino, and Adrianople. The colonization of America is now at length completed from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, but Europe can and ought to move towards the East as well as towards the West; the isthmus of Suez has as good a chance as the isthmus of Panama, to become the route of western civilization to the Greater East.

6. Our European civilization has a twofold source, the Romans and the Teutonic nations. Setting aside for the present Russia, who is a new comer, and who already, however, equals the most powerful of the elder states, it is subdivided into two families, each of which is marked by its strong likeness to one of the mother nations, which have contributed to give birth to both. Thus there is the Latin Europe, and the Teutonic Europe; the former comprises the south, the latter the people of the north; the former is Roman Catholic, the latter Protestant; the one speaks Teutonic languages, and the other, idioms, in which Latin is predominant. These two branches, Latin and German, re-appear in the New World; South America, like southern Europe, is Roman Catholic and Latin; North America belongs to the Protestant Anglo-Saxon population.

In the great enterprise of bringing together European and Asiatic civilization, the Teutonic and Latin nations may both find a field of action; both occupy in Europe and America, by land and sea, admirable outposts and excellent positions round that imperturbable Asia, into which it is their object to force their way. But, during the last age, the superiority which formerly belonged to the Latin family, has passed into the hands of the Teutonic race, owing partly to the energy of England in the Old World, and that of her sons in the New, and partly to the loosening of the old religious and moral ties among the Latin nations. The Sclavonic race, which has lately shown itself, and which now forms a third group of nations in Europe, seems ready to contest with the Latin race even the possession of the second rank; it is only the Russians and Anglo-Saxons that interest themselves about Further Asia, and press upon its frontiers by land and by sea. The people of the Latin stock must not, however, stand idle in the coming struggle, or the case will go against them by default; an excellent opportunity is now offered to regain their lost rank.

7. In our three-headed Europe, Teutonic, Latin, and Sclavonic, two nations, France and Austria, present themselves under less distinct features, and with less exclusive characters than the others. France shares in the Teutonic and Latin natures; in religion, she is Catholic in feeling, but Protestant out of caprice; she unites the nervous understanding of the Germans with the elegant taste of the southern nations. Austria, by the education and origin of the people of her different states, is half Sclavonic, half Teutonic, and she is connected with the Latin family by her religion. France and Austria are, then, the natural mediums of communication, the one between the Germans and Latins, and the other between the Germans and Sclavonians; Austria is chiefly Teutonic, as France is essentially Latin. From this mixed character of France and Austria, we may conclude, that whenever the balance of Europe, or the harmonious combination of all European nations in one common object, shall become subjects of discussion, both will exercise a decisive influence, and their hearty co-operation in a common cause will make them irresistible. Austria has a more central position than France; she has a greater number of points of contact with the different types of western civilization; but France combines the invaluable advantages of a more homogeneous constitution, and a more flexible temperament; she has a physiognomy more strongly marked, a mission more clearly defined, and above all, she has more of the social spirit. She is at the head of the Latin group; she is its protectress.

8. In the events which seem about to dawn upon us, France may, then, take a most important share; she is the depositary of the destinies of all the Latin nations of both continents. She alone can save the whole family from being swallowed up by a double flood of Sclavonians and Germans. To her it belongs to rouse them from the lethargy into which they are plunged in both hemispheres, to raise them to the level of other nations, and to enable them again to take a stand in the world; she also is called upon, perhaps more than any other power, to encourage the new spirit, which seems to be re-animating the Arabians, and through them to shake the East. Thus the political theatre, seen from a French point of view, shows, in a distant back-ground, the meeting of the Oriental and the Western civilizations, in which we are called upon to act as mediators, and in the fore-ground, the education, by France, of all the Latin nations, and of many of the Arab tribes living around the Mediterranean.

There may be a difference of opinion as to the time when these revolutions, which are to agitate the depths of Asia, will take place; I am one of those who think it not far off. I can easily conceive, also, that some persons should wish to lessen the circle of French influence, and confine it to the southern countries of Europe; although to me France seems called upon to exercise a benevolent and wholesome care over the people of South America, who are not yet fit to take care of themselves, and although the old traditions of the crusades, the conquest of Algiers, and the recollection of the expedition into Egypt, seem to promise us one of the first parts in the drama which will be acted on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

As for the European nations of the Latin family, no one, I suppose, can have any doubts concerning our supremacy over them, or concerning our duties, both to them and to ourselves, in relation to them. We have been notoriously the head of the family since the time of Louis XIV., and we can neither shrink from the burdens, nor from the privileges of our situation. Our superiority is acknowledged by all its members, our protection has been accepted by all, whenever it has been offered without selfish views. Happy would it have been for France, if, content with this high prerogative, her princes, and above all he who has added new lustre to the name of Emperor, had not been obstinately bent on the unnatural purpose of extending their authority over the members of the Teutonic family!

9. Since the weight has been thrown into the Saxon scale, since the English race has overborne France and Spain in Asia, in America, and in Europe, new institutions, new rules of government, new ideas, new modes of action, in social, political, and individual life, have sprung up among the English, and more especially among their successors in the New World; everything connected with labor and the condition of the greater number of working men, has been carried to a degree of perfection before unheard of. It seems as if, by the aid of these improvements, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons over the Latin family, must go on constantly increasing. The French, of all the Latin nations, are most favorably placed, and the only one well placed, to avail themselves of these improvements by adapting them to their own exigencies. We are full of energy; never has our mind been more fairly thrown open; never were our hearts more ready to throb for noble enterprises.

But we must set ourselves at work without delay; we must do this, setting aside all considerations of general policy, and of the contact, whether more or less remote, of the two civilizations. It is a matter of the last necessity in regard to ourselves, even supposing that we have not to transmit to the southern nations of Europe, of whom we are the eldest, and to the inhabitants of the Levant, those improvements which their situation demands, and which they are ready to receive at our hands; our own welfare, our own existence is at stake. How, and under what form shall we be able to make the innovations of the English race our own? This difficult and complicated question has been the chief object of my attention during my residence in the New World; I do not claim the honor of having even partially solved it. But I shall feel satisfied, if the thoughts suggested to me by the sight of an order of things so unlike our own, falling under the eyes of one more far-sighted than myself, shall put him in the way of its solution.

[LETTER I.]

RAILROAD FROM LONDON TO PARIS.

London, Nov. 1, 1833.

While railroads are talked of at Paris, they are made here. That from London to Birmingham is already begun; it will be 112 miles in length, and all the stock, to the amount of 12,000,000 dollars, has been taken up by subscription; this road will be continued by another of nearly the same length, from Birmingham to Liverpool, and in five years Liverpool and London will be only eight hours apart. Whilst the English capitalists are executing these great undertakings, the Parisian capitalists look on, but do not stir; they do not even form projects. Not one of them seems to have seriously considered, that even in the present state of things, there is more than twice the number of travellers between Paris and Versailles, than between Liverpool and Manchester, although the railroad between the last named places has been opened three years. In London, therefore, they count little upon the aid of French capitalists in the construction of a railroad from that city to Paris; they desire it, they would be glad to be able to go from one capital to the other in fifteen hours, and at trifling expense; all classes are delighted with the idea of such a thing. But they feel that such a work is neither expedient nor feasible, without the joint action of both nations; and as they dare not hope for the co-operation of France, little is said about it as a serious affair.

Among all the acquisitions, which, since the end of the last century, have enriched the domain of science, none has opened a wider field than Volta's discoveries relative to the motion of electricity, and its development by contact. The phenomena resulting from the two poles of the Voltaic battery offer an inexhaustible mine to the physical philosopher; there is no fact in science more general in its nature, for if any two bodies whatsoever touch each other, they form at once, by their mutual action and reaction, a Voltaic pile of greater or less energy. This physical fact has its counterpart in the moral order of things; if you bring together two men who have hitherto been separated from each other, in however slight a degree they may have any striking quality, their friction will certainly produce a spark. If instead of two men, the two poles of your battery are two nations, the result is greater in the proportion of a nation to an individual. If these two nations are England and France, that is to say, the two most enlightened and most powerful people in the world, this sort of Voltaic phenomenon then acquires a prodigious intensity; it involves nothing less than the safety of an old or the creation of a new civilization.

The predominant qualities, good or bad, of France and England, may be arranged in a series of parallels, the corresponding terms in each of which will be complements of each other. England is pre-eminent in affairs, and the qualities which belong to them, coolness, economy, precision, method, perseverance; taste and genius for the fine arts, with the enthusiasm, the recklessness, the caprice, the irregular habits, the wastefulness, at least in time and words, which characterise the artist, have fallen to the lot of France. On one side, is reason, cautious and sober, but sure-footed, good sense, creeping along the ground; on the other, imagination with her brilliant audacity, but also with her ignorance of things and method, her starts and trips. Here, an admirable energy in struggling against nature and metamorphosing the physical features of the globe; there, an unequalled intellectual activity, and the gift of warming the heart of mankind with its fires. In England, treasures of industry and heaps of gold; in France, treasures of thought, wells of science, torrents of inspiration. In proud Albion, staid, but cheerless manners, reserve pushed to a chilling excess; in our fair France, easiness of manners carried to licentiousness, the old Gaulish gaiety, often savoring somewhat of the camp, a something of the free and easy bordering on the promiscuous (un sans-façon expansif qui frise la promiscuité). On both sides a large dose of pride; among our neighbors, a calculating, ambitious pride; the pride of the statesman and the merchant, which feeds only on power and wealth; which for the country desires conquests, vast colonies, all the Gibraltars and St. Helenas, eagle's nests by which all seas and all shores are commanded; and which for oneself pants for riches, an aristocratic park, a seat in the House of Lords, a tomb in Westminster Abbey. Amongst us, a vain-glorious pride, which longs for the unreal, for ideal pleasures; a thirst after applause for self, after glory for our country; a pride, which, for France, would be satisfied with the admiration of the world, for self, with castles in the air, a riband, an epaulet, a line of Béranger as a funeral oration; the pride of the actor on the stage, of the knight in the lists. On the north of the Channel, prevail religion and positive faith; on the south, scepticism, mingled with enthusiasm. There a deep sentiment of order and respect for rank, combined with a haughty feeling of the dignity of man; here, a people eager for equality, excitable, restless, turbulent, yet docile, often even to weakness, confiding, even to credulity, easily cajoled by its flatterers, submitting to be trampled under foot like a carcase, during the period of its lethargy, and at times given over to the most courtier-like obsequiousness. Among the English the reverence for tradition, among the French the passion for novelty, predominates; among the former respect for the law, and obedience to man, on condition that his supreme rule shall be the law; among the latter, the worship of great men, and submission to the laws if they are defended by the sword of Cæsar. On one side the ruler of the seas, on the other the arbiter of the continent, rousing the world at their pleasure, the one by its lever of gold, the other by the sound of its voice alone. Surely from the reciprocal influences of two nations thus constituted and thus situated on the globe, the most important effects should result, not only on the general cause of civilization, but on their own mutual improvement.

The industrial development is not, indeed, the development of the whole man, but since the beginning of the nineteenth century, no people can be allowed to reckon itself in the first rank of nations, if it is not advanced in the industrial career, if it cannot labor and produce. No people will be powerful that is not rich, and there is now no other way of growing rich but by work. In regard to production and labor, we have much to learn from England, and it is a lesson which is to be learned by the eyes rather than by the ears, by observation better than by reading. If, then, there were a railroad between London and Paris, the French, who have now little knowledge of business, would go to London, where the instinct of method is in the blood, to learn. Our speculators would go to see how simply, promptly, and plainly great enterprises are carried on; our shop-keepers and buyers have to learn from England that to overcharge and to haggle have no connexion with buying and selling advantageously; our capitalists and merchants, that there can be no durable commercial prosperity nor security for capital, where there is no system of credit; they would see the operations of the Bank of England with its branches and the private banks, and perhaps they might be incited to bring home, with the needful modification, institutions and practices so profitable at once to the share holders and to the public. They would here imbibe the spirit of association, which in London sweats at every pore.[A] All of us might here see in what consists and how is realised, that comfort, that care of the person, so essential to the peace and quiet of one's life, and Paris might perhaps be led to free itself from the filth of centuries, which formerly gave it its name, and against which eighteen hundred years later, Voltaire, whom the ancient monarchy and the faith of our fathers could not withstand, warred in vain. As we are full of self-love, we should return from England ashamed of the wretched state of our agriculture, our roads, and our elementary schools, humbled at the insignificance of our foreign commerce, and solicitous to vie with our neighbors. I need not stop to point out what the English might come to seek among us, they are already converts in this matter, they swarm in Paris, while it would be easy to count up the Frenchmen who have been in London. Without saying what the English would get in Paris, I may affirm that they would leave plenty of sovereigns there. To Paris, the city of pleasures, the terrestrial paradise of strangers, the railroad would be a gold mine, and the English, getting familiar with France, would find profitable investments for their capital among us, which would give life and energy to useful enterprises.

The railroad from London to Paris would be a commercial enterprise of the first importance; it would also be a political instrument, a strong bond of union between England and France. But it is more especially as a means of education, that it should be most highly recommended, for there is no fear that the other points of view will be overlooked. The industrial arts, I said before, are learned chiefly through the eyes; this is particularly true in regard to the operatives, for in them, owing to their manner of life, the world of sensation prevails over the world of ideas. Now the progress of the mechanical arts depends not less on the workmen than on the foremen and superintendents of the works; it would be expedient, therefore, to send a certain number of picked operatives to pass a suitable time in England, just as the Board of Public Works (Ponts et Chaussées) is now in the habit of sending a few engineers thither. The railroad, by reducing the expense and trouble of the journey, would probably furnish an opportunity of despatching companies of artisans selected from among those most worthy of the privilege. According to the plan of a merchant of Lyons, a very sensible man, this might be done on a large scale and at little expense; and he further proposed a system of reciprocity, by which English workmen should be employed in France and French operatives in England. It is not impossible that this project may one day be made the basis of a new law, designed to further the views of our excellent law of primary education; but the railroad between London and Paris must first be constructed.

Of the small number of Frenchmen who have visited England,[B] very few have been led by motives of business. Most have undertaken the voyage from vague feelings of curiosity, or merely for pleasure; and the objects of their notice have been the picturesque, the poetical. They have visited the Gothic ruins of the monasteries and castles, the cave of Fingal, and the lakes of Scotland, admired the costume of the Highlanders, the horses and jockeys of the great lords, and the blooming complexion of the women. They have walked through one or two parks, visited the hot-houses where all the plants of the world are collected, braving, behind the glass, the cloudy sky of Great Britain. They have been through the dockyards and military arsenals, when they could get leave, under the escort of a sergeant, seen the young beauties of Almacks and the old curiosities of the Tower, and travelled over England, just as they would make the tour of Italy or Switzerland. If the subject of industry has occupied their attention a moment, it is only in reference to the fashion of some opera decoration. They have, to be sure, stood amazed at the thousands of vessels whose masts stretch out of sight along the Thames or in the docks;[C] they have been delighted with the extent of the great manufacturing towns, the magnitude of the manufactories, and the height of their chimneys, with the magical brilliancy of the gas-lights, with the daring bridges of stone or iron, and with the fantastical appearance of the forge-fires in the night. But they have never asked, how came England to have such a vast number of ships, how has she multiplied and extended her manufactures to such an amazing degree, and how created these towns, so simple in their architecture, but so fastidiously neat in their spacious streets; they have not thought to ask the causes of all this wealth and prosperity.

Yet he who expects to return satisfied from England should visit her as the Queen of industry; he should see the city rather than Regent's Park, the East India House rather than Windsor Castle, seek out the Bank before St. Paul's, the Clearing House before Somerset House, take more interest in the docks and Commercial House, than in the armor preserved in the Tower. He should go to the warehouses, the counting-houses, the workshops, in pursuit of the genius of Great Britain. He must tear himself from the magnificent hospitality of the English country seats, and give up his time to the mines and the forges, which furnish industry with its daily bread, its coal and iron. (Notes 1 and 2 at the end of the volume.) He must mingle with the stout and active workmen, quite as much as with the more refined society in the saloons of the nobility. For myself, I have found nothing in London which has struck me as more original, and given me greater pleasure, than a shop in Old Change, whose ware-rooms contain twenty times as many goods as the largest warehouse in Paris, and whose business transactions amount to two millions sterling a year, and the great brewery of Barclay, Perkins & Co. near London Bridge, the order and arrangement of which are still more striking than its vast extent.

As I stood in this brewery, on a floor on which, distributed in different rooms, there were ninetynine vats, some of them holding 500,000 or 600,000 bottles, I thought of the famous Heidelberg tun which I had seen some years ago. It is the only object in a tolerable state of preservation in the delicious chateau of the Palatine counts, and it is faithfully visited by all travellers who go to see that fine ruin, perhaps the finest relic of the feudal times. What a difference now between the old chateau of Heidelberg with its tun, and the colossal establishment of the English brewer with its regiment of tuns! The old castle crumbles to pieces; the rich Gothic sculptures are wearing away. In vain has a French artist (and, strange coincidence! that artist himself another relic of the feudal age, an émigré, who with a praiseworthy zeal has been for a long time the self-constituted guardian of this fine old monument,) in vain has he urged the government of Baden, to whom the castle belongs, to take some measures for its preservation. Each year some new dilapidation is caused by the frosts of winter and the storms of autumn; the old chateau will soon become a shapeless mass, the very stones will probably be sold, and nothing will remain, but the drawings of M. de Graimbert, to show what it has been. The Knights' Hall is stripped of its roof—the arches, which support the superb terrace whence the eye wanders over the lovely vale of the Neckar and its beautiful heights,—those arches, rent by the powder of Louvois,—will some day sink. Meanwhile, the brewery is enriched one day with a new building, and the next, with a new steam-engine; and in case of any damage by fire, as recently happened, the loss is immediately repaired; in the place of the building destroyed by the flames, rises one more splendid, in which the free use of iron will be a protection against new ravages.

The statues of the Palatine electors are overthrown in their niches; no son of their vassals will set them up again; but at the brewery everything is in perfect order; each tool hangs on its nail, each kettle is kept well-rubbed and bright. The stables of the noble prince are a heap of ruins; in the stables of the brewer, rivalling those of Chantilly, where the great Condé entertained kings, one hundred and fifty horses, fit steeds for Goliath, are objects of as careful attention, as those, perhaps, which surrounded the persons of the first Electors and their gallant knights. The old tun has been empty for a century and a half; the curious may enter it, and take its measure; once only has M. de Graimbert seen it spout wine; it was in 1813, in honour of the emperor Alexander and his allies, the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia. Even then it was only a pious fraud, the old tun was not full, the wine flowed from a base barrel which had been stuck in it the night before. The ninetynine vats of Barclay, Perkins & Co. are always full of beer; that which is daily drawn off, and sent all over the United Kingdom and North America, and finds its way even to the East Indies, would fill the classical tun of the Palatine Casimir.[D] The secret of this contrast may easily be explained; the great feudal tun could only be filled by the produce of the feudal impositions, whilst the vats of the brewery are filled by the voluntary co-operation of three hundred men, sure of gathering daily the fruits of their industry; the Heidelberg tun was emptied only to administer to the pleasures of the prince or his favorites, while the vats of the brewer quench the thirst of a numerous population, which works hard, receives good pay, and pays its providers well.

The silence and desolation of the old castle, contrasted with the bustle and prosperity of the English brewery, are a striking emblem of the feudal system compared with the modern power of peace and creative industry. All nations, in proportion as they have the power to change the warlike qualities of the feudal age into the useful qualities of the labourer, or as they want the capacity thus to re-cast themselves, may read their own destiny, either in the state of the flourishing manufactory, or in that of the deserted and crumbling castle. Happy the people, who, like France and England, have had strength to shake off the past, and who, in the quiet enjoyment of their liberties, have only to concern themselves about the future! Woe to that people, which will not, or cannot, tear itself away from the past! That people is worn out; it will die of consumption, and will leave behind nothing but ruins, poetical, perhaps, but still none the less ruins, that is, death and desolation: unless indeed a new blood be infused into its veins, or in other words, unless it be conquered like unhappy Poland.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Thus the London merchants dispense with the care, trouble, and expense of a money-chest on their own premises, and all money operations are transacted by a small number of bankers at the Clearing House. The amount of these transactions often rises to fifteen millions sterling Babbage's Economy of Machinery.

[B] The whole number of passengers to and from Calais, through which most of the travellers between England and France pass, is only about forty thousand yearly. This is not more than the number passing between Havre and New York.

[C] It is estimated that 25,000 vessels enter the port of London yearly.

[D] 50,000 gallons.

[LETTER II.]

LIVERPOOL AND THE RAILROAD.

Liverpool, Nov. 7, 1833.

I have just come back from Manchester by the railroad, which is a fine piece of work; I know of nothing that gives a higher idea of the power of man. There are impressions which one cannot describe; such is that of being hurried along at the rate of half a mile a minute, or thirty miles an hour (the speed of the train as we started from Manchester,) without being the least incommoded, and with the most complete feeling of security, for only one accident has happened since the opening of the road, and that was owing to the imprudence of the individual who perished. You pass over and under roads, rivers, and canals; you cross other railroads, and a great number of other roads, without any trouble or confusion. The great forethought and spirit of order which in England they suck in with their mothers' milk, preside in every part, and make it impossible that the trains should fall foul of each other, or that the cars should run down unlucky travellers, or the farmers' wagons; all along the route are gates, which open and shut at the precise moment of time, and watchmen on the look out. How many persons in France would be benefitted by this short trip, did it serve only as a lesson of order and forecast! And then the Mount Olive cut is as well worth seeing as Roland's Breach; the Wapping tunnel will bear a comparison with the caves of Campan; the dike across Chat Moss seems to me as full of interest as the remains of the most famous Roman ways, not excepting even the Appian itself; and there is a column, which, though only a chimney for a steam-engine, is not, perhaps, less perfect in its proportions than Pompey's Pillar. Many tourists, even persons who have not been made weary of sight-seeing in Switzerland and Italy, would find Chester Bridge, which is not, indeed, on the road, but is nevertheless very near it, quite as worthy of a visit as the Devil's Bridge; not to mention that the burning cinders which the engine strews along the route, might suggest to the traveller, without any great stretch of fancy, the idea of being transported in a fiery car, certainly the most poetical of all vehicles.

Those who doubt the policy of introducing railroads into France, and think it prudent to wait for more light, cite, among other arguments, the experiments continually making in England to apply locomotive engines to common roads, the success of which, they think, would save the expense of rails. There is no doubt that railroads, like every other new invention, are susceptible of improvement; but they will always be expensive, and while other nations keep up such schools as the Manchester and Liverpool railroad, and we stand looking on with folded arms, we shall soon find ourselves, by excess of caution, fallen behind all Europe in manufactures and commerce. As for the steam-engines of Gurney, Dance, or anybody else, there is no hope that they will enable us to save the expense of rails. I think it, indeed, very probable that engines may be made to take the place of horses on roads kept in such a state as the English highways; but upon any road whatsoever, and whatever motive power is employed, engines or horses, in order to reach a great speed, from twentyfive to thirty miles an hour, for instance, it is absolutely necessary to cut through hills, and to fill up or bridge over the valleys, just as is done for railroads. Besides this great speed forbids the free circulation of vehicles, and makes it necessary to avoid the level of the frequented routes, and to pass over or under them by means of tunnels or bridges. None of the inconveniences, or liabilities of railroads would be avoided by this system; the expense would be almost the same, for the most costly portion of the work in railroads is the cuts and embankments, the bridges and viaducts; the iron required for the rails forms less than one-third of the expenditure. The expenses of superintending the routes would be the same. Besides, the road once graded, there would be a great gain in laying rails, that is, in making a complete railroad, however little might be the amount of transportation; for on a Macadamised road the force of friction is ten times that on iron rails, so that the use of these new locomotive carriages can never supply the place of railways.

The correctness of these views is proved by what is now doing in England; while the new steam carriages are getting ready for regular service, railroad companies are already at work or are organizing in all quarters. Two works are now in progress which will connect Liverpool with London, by way of Birmingham; the whole length will be one hundred and ninety-five miles. Although a trial of the new carriages is making on the Birmingham road, shares in the railroad between that town and London are at a high premium. Another company is preparing to construct a railroad from London to Bath and Bristol, a distance of one hundred and fifteen miles; companies are also formed for connecting London with Southampton, on the Havre route to Paris, and with Brighton, on the Dieppe route; other shorter works are projected. It is not that the experiments of Gurney and Dance are unknown or slighted; on the contrary, their importance is fully felt; the newspapers are full of them, and they even excite some enthusiasm. In this country, where it is a settled maxim that the labourer is worthy of his hire, I saw vessels all along the road which had been gratuitously brought and filled by the inhabitants for the use of one of these steam-carriages; unluckily the carriage did not arrive when it was expected; it had got out of order, as it too often does.

The Liverpool and Manchester railroad owes its brilliant success to the substantial and permanent nature of the interest which binds together the two towns. It would be impossible to realize a more complete division of labor; Manchester, with the country twenty miles round it, is nothing but a workshop; Liverpool manufactures nothing, but merely sells what her neighbours produce. Liverpool is not, whatever the guide book may say, another Venice, rising from the waves; it is a counting-house, and nothing but a counting-house, though on a vast scale, and under the most perfect regulations, of any in the world. The business is all done in a space smaller than the Place du Carrousel, where are the handsome Exchange, the Town House, and all the banking houses, &c. At four or five o'clock each one shuts up his cell (for the offices deserve this name), and retires to his house or his country seat, for many of the residences are on the other side of the Mersey. Liverpool and Manchester are surrounded by a double and three fold series of canals; the Duke of Bridgewater's canal, the Leeds and Liverpool, the Sankey, Leigh, Bolton and Bury, Mersey and Irwell canals, without taking into account the rivers Irwell, Mersey, and Weaver, which though small, form fine bays at their mouths, and are more easily and regularly navigable than our great rivers, while the navigation is carried on with a promptitude and despatch wholly unknown in France. Since the peace these two towns have enjoyed such a high degree of prosperity, that ten years ago these means of communication, with the addition of a fine road, were found to be insufficient. The counting-house and the manufactory wished to be nearer to each other; accordingly, on the 10th of May, 1824, a memorial, signed by one hundred and fifty merchants, declared the necessity of new routes; and a railroad was decided on. The work was begun in June, 1826, and the road was opened in due form, on the 15th of September, 1830. A tunnel is now constructing, one mile and a quarter in length, which will carry the railroad into the heart of the town, and will cost about 800,000 dollars.

The chief article of English commerce, that in which it has no rival, and which opens all the ports of the world to English vessels, is cottons of all descriptions. The value of the produce and manufactures annually exported from the United Kingdom, during the last ten years, has averaged 190 millions of dollars.[E] That of cottons alone has ranged from 80 to 90 millions, and the greater part is made in Manchester and the vicinity.[F] This single fact would sufficiently explain the commercial importance of Liverpool; add to this that Liverpool is in the neighbourhood of the founderies and forges of Staffordshire and Shropshire, and the manufactories of Birmingham and Sheffield; that the diminished width of the island, in the 53d degree of latitude, enables her to reach out her hands at once to the eastern and western coasts; that she is the centre of the business between England and Ireland; that she approaches, at the same time, Scotland and Wales; that she is the head quarters of steam navigation in England, and it will be seen at a glance that Liverpool is the seat of a prodigious commerce, inferior only to that of London. Eleven thousand vessels measuring 1,400,000 tons, enter her nine docks every year; two-fifths of the whole exports of England are shipped hence, and more than one-fifth of the British customs duty, or nearly 20,000,000 dollars (equal to the total sum of the French customs), are collected here. Since the modification of the East India Company's charter, the Liverpool merchants flatter themselves with the hope of securing a great part of the India trade, which has hitherto been monopolized by London; they aspire to rival the commerce of the capital, and it must be confessed that they are taking the right road to success.

In tracing the history of Liverpool, Manchester, or any other English town, we are struck with a fact which is full of good omen for France; it is this, that a people never engages heartily and successfully in commerce and manufactures, until it feels itself safe from civil or religious despotism; but once assured on that point, it moves rapidly and right forward in its industrial career. So long as England was restrained in her franchises or her faith, she was possessed with one idea, how to throw off the yoke; once freed from this care, she has achieved in the different branches of industry what no nation has ever done before. In the beginning of the last century, not long after the expulsion of the Stuarts, when Liverpool had only 5,000 inhabitants, with no commerce but a feeble coasting trade, some of her merchants conceived the idea of competing with Bristol, which then monopolized the West Indian trade. Bristol exported to America the products of the fisheries in the German Ocean, and some fustians and checks manufactured in Germany, and the Liverpool adventurers took cargoes of Scotch stuffs; but the attempt was unsuccessful, the Scotch goods were of inferior quality. Manchester then relieved them from this difficulty; there were already some manufacturers in that place, who imitated and surpassed the German articles, and thus provided, the merchants of Liverpool were able to sustain a competition with those of Bristol. The smuggling trade with the Spanish colonies, and the slave trade, undertaken in competition with Bristol, continued to enrich Liverpool and consequently Manchester. In 1764, when Bristol fitted out 32 ships for Africa and 74 for America, Liverpool ran 105 to the former and 141 to the latter; in the same year 1589 vessels entered the port of Liverpool, while only 675 arrived at Bristol. At present Bristol is a second-rate mart compared with Liverpool; not that the former has declined; on the contrary, it is a wealthy city, with a trade tenfold what it was a hundred years ago. But in the midst of the general progress, Liverpool has advanced at high speed. It now contains 180,000 inhabitants, or, including the suburbs, 225,000, without reckoning the floating population of strangers and sailors. During the siege of Calais, when Edward III. collected all the strength of England, this town found it difficult to furnish one vessel, carrying six men; in 1829, it owned 806 vessels of 161,780 tons burthen, manned by 9,091 sailors. (See Note 4, at the end of the volume.) During the wars of the French Revolution, Liverpool was able to bear her share of the burdens of the country, and to spend 170,000 dollars annually in works of public utility and in embellishing the town. In 1797 she volunteered to raise a troop of horse and eight companies of foot at her own charge; in 1798 she raised a regiment of volunteers and the sum of 80,000 dollars, and in 1803, when Napoleon threatened England with invasion, two regiments of infantry and 600 artillerists. In the same period a host of useful and charitable institutions were founded by subscription, and the Exchange was built at the cost of 600,000 dollars. All this is the work of one century; hardly had James II. reached Saint Germain, when the first dock in Liverpool was opened; within thirty years the Mersey and Irwell were canalled. It was the same throughout England. We must not exaggerate and abuse historical parallels, but, unless we shut our eyes, it is impossible not to perceive a striking analogy between the state of England after the fall of the Stuarts, and that of France since 1830. With both people there is a feeling of profound security in regard to their liberties, a deep conviction that they have gained a decisive victory, and that they have nothing to fear from the encroachments of the civil power or of a religious corporation; the same wish to see political reforms gives rise to substantial and palpable improvement in the condition of the people, and the same disposition on the part of the government to enlighten and realize the popular will.

The old dynasties of England and France fell in consequence of their efforts to give political power to the clergy, rather than from any attempt to restore the feudal system with its brutality and its rapacity; for the deposed princes themselves were neither rapacious nor violent. The English revolution, however, was far from giving birth to irreligion; Liverpool,—which is, so to speak, of to-day, which bears the stamp, not of England as she was in the sixteenth or the fourteenth century, but of England as she was in the eighteenth century, as she is in our own time,—Liverpool is a proof of this. There is no town in France which numbers as many churches as Liverpool, where there are thirty-seven of the establishment, in addition to forty-three dissenters' chapels and meeting houses, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Quaker, Jewish, and Roman Catholic; the last have here five chapels. Most of these have been built since 1750, and nearly one half since 1800; I have a list under my eye, and the dates are 1803, 1810, 1813, 1814, 1815, 1815, 1815, 1816, 1821, 1826, 1826, 1827, 1827, 1830, 1831. Are we to believe that this analogy will hold good on our own soil, and that as she grows rich by industry, France will return to the religious sentiment? I wish it, I hope it; we are already past the time when atheism was fashionable in France; it will not, however, be under the flag of the Anglican church, or of any other protestant sect that France will rally; she must have a more imposing and pompous worship.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] The annual exports of France are little more than half this sum. (See Note 3, at the end of the volume.)

[F] The population of Lancashire, in which are situated Liverpool and Manchester, increased, between 1801 and 1831, from 672,731 to 1,336,854, that is, it doubled. The increase of population in the rest of the United Kingdom was only fifty per cent.

[LETTER III.]

WAR OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES UPON THE BANK.

New York, January 1, 1834.

This country is now in the crisis of a high industrial fever, which has assumed a political character, and is of a very serious nature; for the industrial interest, in this country, is the most important. Last year, when the dispute between the Northern and Southern States, relative to the tariff was settled, (see Note 5, at the end of the volume,) the wise and prudent thanked God, that the danger, which had threatened their country, had been averted; there seemed to them nothing further to obstruct its triumphant career of conquests over nature, with an ever accelerated rapidity and increased success. A series of causes, to appearance of slight moment, has changed these hopes into fears. Some trifling circumstances revived the old quarrel between the democratic party, to which the President belongs, and the Bank of the United States, and both sides grew warm. (See Note 6, at the end of the volume.) President Jackson, a man of good intentions and ardent patriotism, but too hasty towards those who venture to contradict him, declared a deadly war against the Bank, and pushed it with all the energy and fury, in the same cut-and-thrust style, that he had the war against the Indians and English twenty years before. He set his veto to the bill that had passed both houses of Congress, renewing the Bank charter, which was about to expire in three years. Not satisfied with this blow, he withdrew from the hands of the Bank the public money, which, by the provisions of its charter, had been deposited in them, and which gave it the means of very materially extending its operations; for the excess of the deposits over the exigencies of the government amount to not less than ten millions. The Bank, which had paid to the government a bonus of 1,500,000 dollars for the privilege of being the depository of the public funds, cried out loudly against this measure, and with good reason, for no one denies, that no institution in the union is better able to meet all its liabilities. It has reduced its discounts, first, because the removal of the public deposits has diminished the amount of specie in its vaults, and also, as it declares, whether right or wrong, because its very existence being threatened by the President's veto, it is prudent to restrain the sphere of its operations, and to prepare in time for the final settlement of its concerns. As this institution takes the lead in the financial world, the other banks, even those to which the public deposits have been transferred, have been obliged, in their turn, to restrict their operations. Not only are they afraid to extend their discounts in proportion to the amount of these deposits, but they are obliged to contract them, because they find themselves, as objects of the favour of government in this respect, in a state of hostility with the Bank of the United States, and it is necessary to be on their guard in the presence of so formidable an adversary. Thus are the sources of credit suddenly dried up. Now credit is the life-blood of the prosperity of the United States; without credit, the populous towns which are springing up on all sides, as if by magic, the opulent States, which, far away from the Atlantic and beyond the Alleghanies, stretch along the Ohio and the Mississippi, would become a solitary wilderness, savage forests or pathless swamps. The city of New York alone has twenty banks, the annual average discounts of which, during the last eight years, have amounted to one hundred millions. At Paris, where the transactions are certainly more extensive than in New York, the discounts of the Bank of France, in 1831, amounted to 223 million francs, and in 1832 to 151 millions.[G] The amount of the discounts of the Philadelphia banks, in 1831, was 150 millions. A general shock to credit, however transient, is here more terrible than the most frightful earthquake.

If I did not fear to lengthen out this letter beyond measure, I would give some details concerning the struggle between the two parties, concerning their tactics and their measures in Congress and out of it, concerning Mr Clay's speeches and General Jackson's home thrusts. But I think it more important at present, to call your attention to the part which the Bank of the United States has played since its establishment, and to the causes which stirred up against it that mass of hatred and distrust, from which General Jackson derives confidence in his measures. For it is not merely his own dislike that he gratifies; from the last elections, which in almost all the States are based on universal suffrage, it is plain that the numerical majority of the population is, at this moment, opposed to the Bank.

The Americans had already used and abused systems of credit while under the English rule. As soon as they had achieved their independence, they became bolder in their enterprises, more sanguine, or, if you please, more rash in their speculations. They stood in great need of credit; the number of banks was multiplied, and many abuses crept in. The State legislatures made no difficulty in granting bank-charters to whoever asked for them, and in this respect they have not changed their practice. If they imposed some restraints, they had no means of ascertaining or securing their strict observance. The banks, therefore, often issued an amount of bills wholly disproportionate to their real capital, not merely twice or thrice, but ten times the value of their specie and other means. The originators of the bank often chose themselves directors, and discounted no paper but their own, or rather they lent to themselves the whole circulation of the bank, on the bare deposit of the bank shares. This was an ingenious process to enable whoever pleased to coin current money, without ingots of gold or silver. The mismanagement of these banking companies has sometimes been such, that instances have occurred where the officers of the bank have, on their own authority, opened a credit for themselves, and generally admitted their friends to share in the privilege. Thus it was discovered, that the cashier of the City Bank in Baltimore had lent himself 166,548 dollars, and had made loans to one of his friends to the amount of 185,382 dollars; all the other officers had taken the same liberty, with the exception of one clerk and the porter.

The banks abusing the privilege of issuing bills, that is to say of making loans, individuals abused the privilege of borrowing; hence mad speculations, and consequently losses by the lender and borrower. The banks cloaked theirs by new issues of paper, individuals theirs by new loans; but there were many failures of speculators, and some of banks. The latter excited the public indignation without reforming any one. The honest and moderate working classes, the farmers[H] and mechanics, who found that in the end they were the dupes of the speculators, since by the depreciation of the paper money, which they had taken as so much specie, they came in for a share of the loss, but had no part in the gain, that is, in the dividends, conceived a violent hatred against the banking system. To this particular cause of dislike, was added that aversion which may be found in Europe and everywhere else, felt by persons of methodical habits, gaining little by hard labour, but gaining regularly, against those who are impatient to make their fortune, and to make it at all events, and who waste what they make in the most unbounded luxury and by the most foolish enterprises, in less time than they have been in acquiring it. Then there was the natural jealousy of simplicity against cunning, of slow and heavy minds against the shrewd penetration of others. There was also that suspicious distrust of all new influences, and all power that aims to strike its roots deep, a distrust, which is essential to the American, and which is the source, explanation, and safeguard of his republican institutions. In short, in 1811, when the old Bank of the United States, which was on a much smaller scale than the present Bank, petitioned Congress for a renewal of its charter, an appeal was made to the farmers and mechanics, and, as at the present day, the hobgoblin of a new aristocracy, and the worst of all, an aristocracy of money, was summoned up; the petition was not granted.

Soon after, in 1812, war broke out between England and the United States. The natural effect of war is to diminish confidence, to make the merchants timid, speculators cautious. Most of the banks, having been managed with little prudence in better times, were soon unable to meet the call for specie by the public; they solicited and obtained from their respective legislatures leave to suspend specie payments. Their bills had a forced circulation. At the peace of 1815 the banks were not able to resume specie payments, and the system of inconvertible paper money was persevered in. Imagine then two hundred and forty-six classes of paper money,[I] circulating side by side, having all degrees of value, according to the good or bad credit of the bank which issued them, at 20 per cent., 30 per cent., or 50 per cent. discount. Gold and silver had entirely disappeared; there was no longer any standard of price and value; the amount of bills in circulation had become prodigious.[J] To the bills of the banks was added a great amount of individual obligations of still less value, issued by private persons as suited their wants, and which circulated more or less freely in the neighbourhood. It was a frightful scene of confusion, a Babel, where all business became impracticable from the utter impossibility of the parties understanding each other.

It was now felt that, to restore order in the bosom of this chaos, there was needed a regulating power, capable of commanding confidence, with ample funds to enable it to pay out specie freely, and whose presence and, in case of necessity, whose authority, should serve to recall the local banks to their duty. In 1816, the present Bank of the United States was, therefore, chartered by Congress for a term of 20 years, with a capital of 35 millions, and it went into operation on the 1st of January, 1817. The seat of the mother-bank is Philadelphia, and it has 25 branches scattered over the Union. By its interference and assistance specie payments were resumed by the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk Banks on the 20th February, 1817, and in course of time all the other Banks followed the example. This resumption of specie payments was, first for the banks and then for individuals, the signal, the occasion, the rule of a general settling up of old accounts. As there had been much prodigality, unsuccessful speculations, and dead loss, accumulated through a period of 20 years, there was now a complete breaking up; many banks failed or suspended their operations, and from 1811 to 1830, 165 banks were reduced to one or the other of these alternatives. This state of things lasted three years; they were three years of crisis, three years of suffering for industry, that is, for the people of the United States; for this people is identified with its commerce. The trials of this period have left a deep and lasting impression. Hatred of speculators and of the Banking system has taken root in the hearts of the mass of the people, and now springs up in hostility to the Bank of the United States, which, in the eyes of the multitude, is the representative of the system, although it is itself innocent of the mischief, and can alone prevent its recurrence.

The antipathy of the greatest number against the banks has then a reasonable cause, but it is not, therefore, any the less blind and unjust. They see nothing but abuses, and shut their eyes against the advantages. The great extension of credit, which resulted from the great number of banks, and from the absence of all restraint on their proceedings, has been beneficial to all classes, to the farmers and mechanics not less than to the merchants. The banks have served the Americans as a lever to transfer to their soil, to the general profit, the agriculture and manufactures of Europe, and to cover their country with roads, canals, factories, schools, churches, and, in a word, with every thing that goes to make up civilization. Without the banks, the cultivator could not have had the first advances, nor the implements necessary for the cultivation of his farm, and if the credit system has given facilities for stock-jobbing to speculators, it has also enabled him, although indirectly, to buy at the rate of one, two, or three dollars an acre, and to cultivate lands, which are now, in his hands, worth tenfold or a hundred fold their first cost. The mechanics who attack the banking system, forget that they owe to it that growth of manufacturing industry, which has raised their wages from one dollar to two dollars a day. They forget that it furnishes the means by which many of their number raise themselves to competence or wealth; for in this country every enterprising man, of a respectable character, is sure of obtaining credit, and thenceforth his fortune depends upon his own exertions.[K]

At the end of 1819, commerce revived, the financial system of the United States seemed settled on a sure basis. Since that time, some shocks have been felt, as in 1822, and in 1825, the latter the reaction of the great English crisis, but in both cases the storm soon passed away. The root of the evil was struck on the day that the Bank of the United States went into operation. This great establishment, which committed some errors at first and paid the penalty, has for a long time been conducted with the most consummate prudence. Most of the leading commercial men, that is to say, most of the talents, of the country are attached to it as directors, and its foreign correspondents or associates are the houses whose credit is most firmly established, such as the Barings of London, and the Hottinguers of Paris. It exercises the necessary control over all the local banks, obliges them to restrain their emissions by calling upon them for specie, or by refusing to receive their bills when the issues are excessive. It was by its agency that the currency of the United States was established on so large a basis, that, in 1831, the banks were able, without any effort, to discount the amount of 800,000,000 dollars, in the principal cities of the Union, or 1,100,000,000 for the whole country.

Now, this state of prosperity seems to be coming to an end. Here, in New York, the banks have ceased to discount, and on good paper, for two or three months, 15, 18, and 24 per cent. per annum have been paid, the usual rate of the Bank of the United States, and of most of the local banks, being 6 per cent. At Philadelphia, 18 per cent. per annum has been given on excellent paper at short dates. At Baltimore, merchants of great wealth have been obliged to stop payment. Nobody buys; nobody can sell. Orders for foreign goods are held back; and as every body here is engaged in business, this state of things threatens all interests, is the subject of all conversations, of all writing, and of all thoughts. God grant that the sight of the impending danger may calm the passions, and that the good sense of the community may banish empty prejudices and false fears! God grant that both parties may forget their mutual animosities in their anxiety for the common welfare! This should be our prayer, not only for the sake of the destinies of this great nation, but also because our silk manufacturers and the owners of our vineyards, will pay a part of the expenses of the campaign against the banks in general, which the radical party is about to open, by a mortal contest, with the Bank of the United States.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] The maximum of the discounts of the Bank of France was in 1810, when it amounted to 710 million francs. In 1813, they were 640 millions, in 1826, 689 millions; at these two periods the Bank made a great effort to sustain commerce. It had less courage in the crisis of 1831-32.

[H] The Americans have retained the English word farmer, which properly signifies one who cultivates a hired soil, fermier, although among them the cultivators are proprietors.

[I] The number of banks at that time.

[J] There was more paper in circulation in 1816 than in 1834, when the extent and value of business were very much greater.

[K] The mechanics and farmers have no credit open at the banks, but the traders from whom they buy their tools, implements, raw material, and provisions, having that advantage, are able to deal with them on favourable terms; the farmer and mechanic are thus benefitted indirectly, if not immediately, by the banks.

[LETTER IV.]

DEMOCRACY—THE BANK.

New York, January 11, 1834.

The financial crisis brought on by the quarrel between the President and the Bank, has not become more serious; there is a great scarcity of money, that is, a great diminution of credit, but the failures are not yet numerous or considerable. The last arrivals from Europe have brought us the news that several of the trades in Paris and at Lyons have refused to work. What is taking place here in regard to the Bank, is analogous to what is passing in France among the tailors, bakers, and carpenters, and what occurs daily in England among the manufacturing operatives. In Europe, and particularly in France, it is the rising of a democracy or rather a radicalism, which is yet in embryo, and which, if it please God, will never come to maturity. In America, it is the despotic humour of a full grown democracy, passing more and more into radicalism, the longer it rules without a rival and without a counterpoise.

It seems to me improbable that the journeymen carpenters, tailors, and bakers of Paris, should ever give the law to their masters. Among us, the middling class (bourgeoisie) is beginning to feel that it is its duty to improve the condition of the working class. It has the authority, but it is conscious that the people has the physical force. The people has counted its own ranks and those of the bourgeoisie, but it feels that it is not enough to have the number; it sees that it has nothing to expect from violence, and that it can back its friends only by improved habits of order and morality. On both sides their reciprocal rights are mutually acknowledged; each fears and respects the other. Here, on the contrary, it is perfectly natural that the democracy should rule the capitalists, merchants, and manufacturers; it possesses at once the physical force and the political power; the middling and upper classes inspire it neither with fear nor with respect. The equilibrium is gone; there is no guarantee against the popular caprice in the United States, but the good sense of the people; it must be allowed that this good sense is quite extraordinary, but it is not infallible. A popular despotism is as easily deluded by flatterers, as any other despotism.

The Bank of the United States is at this time experiencing the truth of this observation. I have already alluded to some of the crying abuses which have excited a violent hatred against the banks in general, although without the aid of the banks it would have been impossible for the United States to have increased in population, wealth, and territory as they have done. These abuses were and are the acts of the local banks, and not of the Mammoth Bank. On the contrary, the latter, by the control which it exercises over the local banks for its own security, checks and limits these abuses, if it does not completely prevent them. The legislatures of the different States have been repeatedly called to deliberate on the question of abolishing all banks and breaking up the banking system; but they have generally thought, and justly, that the remedy would be worse than the disease. They have attempted to cure the disorder by restrictive provisions in the charter of new banks. The State of of New York, in 1829, embraced the whole subject in the Safety-Fund Act, which established a mutual supervision of the banks over each other, under the direction of the Bank Commissioners, and creates at their common expense a safety fund, designed to indemnify the public in case of the failure of any one of the banks. But these measures of repression or prevention have generally proved inefficacious, either from a defect in the means of coercion possessed by the government, or from a reluctance to use the powers conferred by the laws.

In their report of the 31st of January, 1833, the New York Bank Commissioners urgently call the attention of the legislature to the serious dangers which may result from these institutions as they are now organized, particularly in the country, and to their excessive issues in proportion to the small quantity of specie in their vaults. With two millions in specie, the banks of the State had, at that time, a circulation of above twelve millions. But this report itself proves, that the commissioners did not dare to fulfil the duties imposed on them by the Safety-Fund act; they had the authority to shut up the offending banks. Their warnings have not prevented the legislature from chartering new banks by the dozen. This year it will have to act on 105 petitions for charters, that is, eighteen more than the actual number of banks in the State. To be sure in the present instance, the let alone principle will probably be violated, for the Governor's Message of January 7, 1834, urges the two houses to arrest the flood. This Bank mania, as Jefferson called it, is created by the profits of banking, which is, and more especially was, before the institution of the Bank of the United States, the best kind of speculation, exactly in the ratio of the abuses attending it.[L]

In the local banks, especially in the country banks, the chief aim of the president and directors is, at all events, come what may, to make the semi-annual dividend as large as possible. By extending their operations excessively, they may, if they lose the public confidence, be driven to a failure; but in the United States the prospect of such a disaster is much less terrible to the greater number of merchants, and even to the smaller companies, than it is in Europe. (See Note 7, at the end of the volume.) When a bank fails, there is, indeed, a great outcry, because the number of victims is large, and the loss extends to all classes; for most of the bills being of the denomination of five dollars and under, they are very generally distributed in the hands of the labourers, as well as of the wealthier classes. But just in proportion to the distribution of the loss over the greater number of persons, is the quickness with which the clamor ceases. The president, the cashier, the directors, and others principally interested, readily find means to recover from the blow, by obtaining credit elsewhere, and the whole affair is at an end.

The Bank of the United States, on the contrary, directed by men of large fortune and established reputation, connected in business with the principal houses in Europe, charged with a vast responsibility, subject to the supervision of the Federal government, which names five of the directors out of twentyfive, and officiously watched by an army of journalists, is interested and obliged to follow another course. Not that it has not committed some errors; but it paid dear for them, and has never repeated them. Neither are its rules and regulations perfect; the experience of twenty years will doubtless suggest some modifications. But even its adversaries admit that it has been admirably managed. They pretended, at first, that the public money was not safe in its vaults, but they are at present ashamed to insist upon this point, as the investigation made by the House of Representatives proved the absurdity of the charge. The accusations now brought against it are of a political character.

Politically considered, indeed, the existence of an institution so powerful as the Bank of the United States may present some inconveniences. The fundamental maxim of the Federal and State constitutions is, that the supreme authority is null and void; there is no government here in the true sense of the word; that is, no directing power. Each one is his own master; it is self-government in all its purity. This anomalous and monstrous development of the individual principle is no evil here, it is even a great good at present; it is the present stage in the progress of the United States, because self-government is the only form of government to which the American character, as it is, can accommodate itself. If individuality had not free elbow-room here, this people would fall short of its destiny, which is to extend its conquests rapidly over an immense territory, for the good of the whole human race, to substitute, in the shortest time possible, civilization for the solitude of the primitive forests, over a surface ten times greater than all France, of as great average fertility as that country, and capable, therefore, of accommodating 350 millions of inhabitants.

From these considerations it is clear, that any power whatsoever, if possessed of great influence, and exercising it over a great space, would be inconsistent with the political system of the country; for this reason the Federal and State governments are in a permanent state of eclipse. And it is furthermore evident, that the Bank, which is met at every turn as an agent in all transactions, which governs credit, regulates the currency, animates or checks at will the activity of commerce by narrowing or widening the channels of circulation, the Bank, which by its numerous branches is, like the fabled polypus, everywhere present, the Bank with its funds, its centralisation, its trusty creatures, is certainly an anomaly, which may become big with danger. One might, from an abstract, theoretical point of view, imagine cases, in which this financial colossus, seated in the heart of a country absorbed in business, would press with a crushing weight on the liberties of the people. If it were possible that a new Monk should wish to restore the English rule, or that a new Bonaparte, the saviour of the republic in another Marengo, should attempt to make himself dictator, it would also be possible that a conspiracy between the Bank and this Monk, or this Napoleon, might overthrow the liberties of America. But such an event, possible to be sure in theory, (for in theory nothing is impossible,) is, at present, wholly impracticable in fact. Yet there are honest and enlightened men, on whom this theoretical danger makes more impression, than the necessity of a regulator amidst the chaos of 500 banks, or of an agent, which, by controlling the currency, should be in financial affairs, what the vast rivers of the country are in the system of internal communication. They fear more, for this land of industry, from the imperceptible tyranny of the Bank, than from a system in which there would be no check on the cupidity of the local banks, and in which they might renew, with their paper money, if not the assignats of France, of the Continental money of the Revolution, at least the commercial anarchy which followed the war of 1812.

Unluckily for the United States, it is not on this high ground of foresight, that President Jackson and his friends take their stand in their attack on the Bank. They do not say, that it is possible that it may some time, under a new state of things, become an instrument of oppression; they pretend that it is so already. According to them, it tends to nothing less than the subjugation of the country to its rule. In his last annual message, and in an official paper read to the cabinet on the 18th of September, 1833, the President accuses the Bank: 1. With having intrigued to bring up the question of the renewal of its charter in Congress during the session of 1831-32, in order to reduce him to the alternative of giving his sanction to the bill, or losing the votes of the friends of the Bank in the approaching election, if he refused it. He forgets that he had himself, in his message at the opening of that session, recommended to Congress to settle the business. 2. Of having meddled with politics in opposing his election in 1832, and of having, with this purpose, enlarged its loans and discounts twenty-eight and a half millions. The Bank replies that the statement is incorrect; that its books show, that its available means having been augmented, between January and May, 1831, ten millions, and the requisitions of commerce having increased, it had judged it expedient to extend its credits seventeen and a half millions, so that the actual extension of its operations was only four and a half millions. 3. Of having attempted to corrupt the public press, either by printing a great number of pamphlets, or by gaining over the newspapers. The Bank answers to this charge, that it has a perfect right to defend itself by the press, against the continual attacks upon it to which the press gives currency, that it may certainly be allowed to reprint the speeches delivered in its favor in Congress, or essays in which questions of banking are luminously treated, such as that by the celebrated Mr Gallatin, who was twelve years Secretary of the Treasury, and afterward minister to France. As to the vague imputation of attempting to corrupt a press, which pours forth such a number of journals as the press of the United States, (see Note 8, at the end of the volume,) it does not deserve a serious answer.

If a European government, from motives of this character, on facts thus destitute of proof, should attempt to destroy an institution essential to the prosperity of the country, the cry of despotism would be raised on all sides. If the state were itself interested in the institution to the amount of one fifth of its capital (7 millions of dollars), many persons would charge such an attempt not only with violence, but with folly. In the United States the numerical majority, which is the majority of electors, applauded General Jackson's campaign against the Bank almost as enthusiastically as his campaign at New Orleans. The military success of General Jackson, his honesty, his iron firmness, have given him an astonishing popularity. The Bank, on the contrary, in spite of its daily services, (see Note 9, at the end of the volume,) is unpopular; it is so on account of the popular hatred of the Banking System, on account of that jealousy, which, in a land of perfect equality and suspicious democracy, follows in the steps of wealth and pomp; it is so because its extensive privileges shock all republican feelings. In the United States, in spite of the general habits and laws of equality, there is a sort of aristocracy founded on knowledge or on commercial distinction. This aristocracy, somewhat prone to entertain a contempt for the vulgar multitude, causes a strong reaction against itself in the popular mind, and as it supports the Bank by its influence and its writings, this is enough, of itself, to set the pure democracy against the institution. Add to this, that the Bank, irritated by the hostile demonstrations of the administration, has sometimes answered it by angry acts of reprisal, not grave in themselves, but unfortunate in their consequences, and of which its adversaries have adroitly availed themselves to excite the popular passions. Although the Bank has the majority of the Senate in its favor, the chances are now against it. Unless the multitude, which now shouts Hurrah for Jackson! without reflection, shall be led, between this and March, 1836, when its charter expires, to reflect seriously on the matter, it will disappear, until a new experience shall again prove that it is impossible to get along without it.

Thus, at the very moment when the English Reform ministry is renewing the charter and confirming the privileges of the Bank of England, with the approbation of all Europe, here a compact mass, in which, indeed, the enlightened do not form the majority, but in which, notwithstanding, some are included, deals the death-blow to a similar institution, tried and proved by long services. Thus, while one of the greatest, perhaps, in an economical point of view, the very greatest of the benefits which France could receive, would be the establishment of a system of banks, connected with each other as the twenty branches of the Bank of the United States are with the mother bank, America is about to witness, if not the death, at least the suspension of an institution, that has been fruitful of so much good, without the slightest immediate loss of popularity by those who are doing the work of destruction. So goes the world in the United States. The history of this affair shows that the political springs are here wholly different from those that operate in Europe, and that nevertheless, intrigue and petty hate have free course here as well as elsewhere.

FOOTNOTES:

[L] The dividends of the Bank of North America were, in 1792, 15 per cent.; in 1793, 13 1-2; from 1794 to 1799 inclusive, 12 per cent.; from 1804 to 1810, 9 per cent. Those of the old Bank of the United States varied from 7 5-8 to 10 per cent. Those of the Pennsylvania Bank, from 1792 to 1810, from 8 to 10. The Bank of the United States regularly divides 7 per cent. to the share-holders. In the city of New York the average dividends of the banks in 1832, was 6.14 per cent.; of the country banks 9 per cent. It must not be forgotten that the legal rate of interest is higher in the United States than in Europe; it is 6 per cent. in Pennsylvania, 7 in New York, from 8 to 9 in the Southern States, and 10 in Louisiana. In the Western States there is no regulation of interest by law, but the ordinary rate is very high.

[LETTER V.]

MOVEMENT OF PARTIES.—BANK QUESTION.

Philadelphia, Jan. 5, 1834.

Of all the cities of the Union, the peaceful Philadelphia is the most disturbed by the Bank question, because it is the seat of the mother bank. The State of Pennsylvania also, of all the States, suffers the most from the financial crisis, because it is the most deeply in debt, and is obliged to borrow more, either to finish its canals and railroads, or to pay the interest on its existing debt. Conceive of the situation of a State, whose population amounts to only 1,500,000 souls, loaded with a debt of twenty and a half millions, whose ordinary expenditures are less than 600,000 dollars, but which must raise one million to pay interest already accrued, and nearly two millions and a half, for the next summer, under penalty of seeing her great works, executed at an enormous expense, go to ruin, and who knows not whither to turn. This is not all; some old loans must be reimbursed next May, or in three months, and, to crown the whole, the capitalists who contracted last year for a loan of three millions, to be employed on the public works, are, in consequence of the present crisis, unable to fulfil their contracts. The local banks, which are bound by their charters to lend the State at the rate of 5 per cent., rather stand in need of assistance themselves. To these public embarrassments is added the private distress, and thus this country, which Cobbett, who always shows talent, and occasionally gleams of good sense, dubs the Anti-Malthusian, exhibits for the present the spectacle of a superabundance of labourers. In the manufacturing districts of Pennsylvania, many of the operatives are without work.

The condition of the rest of the country is not, in general, any more favorable. I am very ready to believe that the Anti-Jackson newspapers, for so they call themselves, exaggerate the distress; but making all due allowance for rhetorical flourishes, it is still undeniable that there is much distress, especially among the commercial class. Bare figures are more eloquent than the best advocates of the Bank, and it is a notorious fact, that excellent paper has been discounted at the rate of 18 per cent. per annum, and at even higher rates, in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The price currents and the state of the stock-market, show a general fall in prices of 15, 20, 30, and even 40 per cent. Thus far the efforts of the President to fell the hydra of the moneyed aristocracy, the Mammoth, the Monster, have had no other effect than to blast credit and the commercial prosperity of the country; for the Bank has been administered with so much ability, especially since the presidency of Mr Biddle, one of the most distinguished men in the country, that notwithstanding the abrupt removal of the public deposits, notwithstanding the unexpected and unfair assaults upon some of the branches, particularly that of Savannah[M], it is beyond comparison the most solvent and safe of all the financial institutions in the Union. At this critical moment it has as much specie (ten millions) as all the other 500 banks taken together, and I know from good authority, that many Jackson men (this is the epithet adopted by themselves), have been very glad to be sprinkled with a few drops of the venom of this dangerous reptile.

If what is now taking place in this country were to occur in any European monarchy, those persons who insist upon all nations having a government cast in the republican mould, whatever may be the condition of their territory and population, their wealth and knowledge, their character and manners, would not fail to make it the text of their harangues against monarchical governments; holding up to view the picture of an unparallelled commercial prosperity, checked of a sudden by the caprice of the sovereign, they would prove that such is one of the unavoidable consequences of an opposition between the interest of the ruler and the welfare of the nation; they would demonstrate by geometrical syllogisms, that it is the essence of monarchy to place authority in the hands of the weak and the foolish, who, to gratify their personal malice, would not hesitate to hazard the happiness of millions. They would raise the cry of secret influence, of intrigue, which, according to them, is one of the attributes of monarchies. Unluckily for this theory, it is belied by facts under my own eyes, in the most thorough and flourishing republic that has ever existed. The selfishness of royalty, or more correctly speaking of courts, has hitherto begot much mischief and will continue to do so in future; but it has met with its match in the bosom of republics, and above all under a system of absolute equality, which distributes political power in absolutely equal quantities to the intelligent and the ignorant, to the most eminent merchant and author, and the brutal and drunken peasant of Ireland, who is but just enrolled in the list of citizens. An absolute people, as well as an absolute king, may reject for a time the lessons of experience and the councils of wisdom; a people as well as a king, may have its courtiers. A people on the throne, whose authority is limited by no checks, may blindly and recklessly espouse the quarrels of the minions of the day; let those who doubt it come here and see it. Ignorance of the true interests of the country is not the exclusive prerogative of monarchies. The official papers of the Federal Executive in the affair of the Bank, so far as concerns a knowledge of the principles of government and the springs of the public welfare, are on a level with the measures of the government of Spain or Rome. And yet this Executive is the creature of the popular choice in the largest sense. It is not merely in monarchies, that a dancer is to be seen in the post that belongs to a mathematician. The camarilla! Never have I heard it so much talked about, as since I have been in this country. It is here called the Kitchen Cabinet, and admitting a fourth of what is said by the opposition to be true, it is difficult not to believe that its influence upon public affairs is greater than that of the ministerial cabinet.

But to return to the Bank. Congress met on the 3d of December; and most of the State Legislatures are now in session. Every where, and above all in Congress, the great, not to say the only question agitated, is that of the Bank. The subject of the discussions is the removal of the public deposits, which the President has withdrawn from the Bank after a military fashion, having previously, in the same spirit, removed from office the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Duane, who, although opposed to the Bank, considered the President's course illegal and rash. Thus far, the manifestations of public opinion and the deliberative assemblies are extremely various and discordant. In New Jersey, a small and unimportant State, the Assembly has adopted, by a large majority, resolutions approving the acts of the administration, and instructing its delegates in Congress to support the President; notwithstanding which, Mr Southard, one of the Senators from that State, has made an excellent speech on the other side of the question. The Assembly of New York, the first State in wealth and population, has adopted similar resolutions by a vote of 118 to 9. Some persons to be sure, assert that this is because New York would like to have the Mother Bank.[N] The youthful State of Ohio, whose growth borders on the miraculous (it now contains eleven hundred thousand inhabitants, although but 50 years ago it had not six thousand), Ohio, the Benjamin of the democracy, has strongly expressed the same wishes. The little State of Maine has done the same. The administration party lately had a brilliant opportunity of displaying its sympathies and its hatred. The 8th of January, the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, was celebrated by innumerable public dinners, at each of which numerous toasts were drank. President Jackson was the hero, and the Bank was the scape-goat, of the day. It would be impossible to imagine the flood of accusations, insults, and threats, which was poured upon it, mingled with jests in the taste of the country upon Mr Biddle; thus, at one of these dinners, the Bank was toasted, as being governed by Young Nick according to the principles of Old Nick.

But the population of New England, particularly that of Massachusetts, is opposed to the administration. In Virginia the same opinions seems to prevail, and it is the same with several of the old Southern States. The merchants and manufacturers of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and a hundred other places, have held meetings and adopted resolutions, strongly censuring the conduct of the government towards the Bank, and accusing it of having caused the present crisis. Most of the Philadelphia Banks have petitioned in favor of the Bank. Several Banks at Boston and in Virginia have refused to take the public money in deposit; those of Charleston have been unanimous in this measure. The majority of persons of intelligence, experience, and moderation, and most of the merchants and manufacturers, are in favour of the Bank. The country, particularly in the Middle and Western States, and the operatives in the towns, go for General Jackson.

In Congress the majority of the Senate is friendly to the Bank, and the majority of the House is on the side of the Administration. The superiority in debate belongs to the defenders of the Bank. In the Senate, the three greatest statesmen in the country, Messrs Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, are on this side of the question, and the speeches of Messrs Clay and Calhoun have made a strong impression. In the House Mr Binney, of Philadelphia, and Mr McDuffie have pleaded the same cause with ability. On the other side there has been more highflown declamation than reasoning. I have been struck with the resemblance between most of the speeches and newspaper essays directed against the Bank, and our republican tirades of 1791 and 1792. There are the same declamatory tone, the same swollen style, the same appeal to the popular passions, with this difference, that the allegations made here are vague, empty, and indefinite, while with us fifty years ago the grievances were real. Most generally the pictures presented in these declamations, are fantastical delineations of the moneyed aristocracy overrunning the country with seduction, corruption, and slavery in its train; or of Mr Biddle aiming at the crown. Amidst this swarm of speeches and essays, one hardly ever meets with any indications of serious study or a tolerable knowledge of the subject; but I have been struck with the speech of Mr Cambreleng, who has put forth some prudent suggestions as to the reforms required in the present system of banking. For it must be confessed, that this animosity of the President and the body of the people against the Bank of the United States, blind and unreasonable as it is, is founded on a real necessity, namely, that of a complete reorganization of the banking system. When Congress renewed the charter of the Bank of the United States without modification, in 1832, it committed an error. It should have seized this opportunity to place the currency of the country on a more solid basis; and if General Jackson had abode by the terms of his veto message, in which he declared that he was not opposed in principle to the establishment of a National Bank, but that the present Bank could not be retained without some modification, he might have become the benefactor of his country. He would not, indeed, have received Cobbett's congratulations, but he would have obtained the approbation of all statesmen and men of sense in the Old and the New World. However, whatever his friends may say, as the President did not foresee the distress, which has befallen American commerce, and as nobody can doubt his patriotism, we need need not yet despair of seeing him adopt this wise course.

The present crisis abundantly proves the wretched condition of the currency, for the original cause of it was quite slight; it was merely the transfer from the vaults of one bank to those of another of ten millions, an inconsiderable sum relatively to the amount of the business of the country. If the local banks, in spite of the control exercised by the Bank of the United States, had not previously passed all bounds, they would have been able, when the Bank of the United States was obliged to contract its discounts by the withdrawing of the public money, to have enlarged their own in the same proportion, since those same funds were transferred to their vaults. But the framework of these banks is so badly put together, that it shakes at the slightest breath. The slight motion in the political and commercial atmosphere caused by the President's blow at the Bank, in removing the public deposits, was enough to make them totter. They are like a colossus with clay feet, which should have feet of gold, or in other words, specie in their vaults.

The proportion of metals, of which we have an excess in France, is here extremely small. In many States, among others New York, there is an enormous quantity of bills of one, two, and three dollars. In South Carolina there are 25 cent, and even 12 1-2 cent bills. In Pennsylvania, Virginia, and some other States, there are none of less than five dollars. The Bank of the United States emits none of less than that sum; but this minimum is too low. Most political economists, and particularly the English, lay it down as an axiom, that the most perfect money is paper; this is true, if we suppose a nation in which any disturbance of industry, in consequence or apprehension of war, from foolish speculations, from glut or panic, is impossible. In such a land of cockayne, such a terrestrial paradise, an unshaken confidence would prevail in all transactions, and consolidate all interests. The metals would only serve to strike medals and to preserve inscriptions intended to commemorate this ineffable bliss. Paper would there be on a par with gold, and even higher, as some English writers have maintained it should be. I do not know if there will ever be a nation in such a state of heavenly happiness; but I doubt it, because in the world of finance, as well as in the world of passion, I consider the Tender River a fable, and pastorals a sport of fancy; but it is very evident that no such people exists now, or will for some time to come. Now in the United States, the present banking system, like that of England from 1797 to 1821, or even 1825, is founded on this theory of the most perfect money. It is provided, indeed, that the banks shall pay gold for their paper on demand; but by the side of this clause, which tends to keep a certain quantity of the metals in the country, is inserted another, which neutralises it; it is the power of emitting bills in any number, and of the sum of 1, 2, 3, or 5 dollars. In prosperous times, the emission of paper is abundant, indefinite; as the necessity of a metallic standard ceases to be felt, in proportion to the confidence which prevails, the metals disappear before the excess of paper; there is scarcely any left in the country. Since I have been in the United States, I have not seen a piece of gold except in the mint. No sooner is it struck off, than the gold is exported to Europe and melted down. When a crisis comes on, the demand for the precious metals increases rapidly, because every one attaches more value to a positive standard than to paper, and the later the application of the remedy for the scarcity of metals, the longer does the crisis last, and the more serious does it become.

In a new country, where capital cannot, of course, be abundant, for capital of all kinds, whether of articles of food or precious metals, is the accumulated produce of labour, it is natural, that the proportion of paper money should equal and surpass that of metallic money. The existence of paper money is even a great benefit to any country. In France we have the enormous sum of 600 million dollars in specie; (see Note 10, at the end of the volume); in the United States 40 millions are sufficient for all the transactions of a commerce nearly as extensive as our own. In England the amount of specie at present does not exceed 220 millions, mostly in gold. Bank notes in circulation, which constitute the rest of the currency, amount at this time, in the United States, to 100 million, that is, two and a half times the amount of specie; in England to about the same as the specie, which gives for the whole circulation of

If we had in France the industrial habits of the English and Anglo-Americans, 200 millions of circulating medium, half in paper and half in specie, would probably be sufficient for our operations; but considering our commercial inferiority, suppose that we should require 300 millions, of which two thirds should be metallic, and one third paper, it would follow that we might advantageously employ 400 millions, which are now unproductive in the form of specie, and which add nothing to our pleasures, our comfort, or our industrial capacity. But if we might expect great benefit from banks of circulation and the paper which they would issue, it is evident that the Americans, in the present stage of their wealth, and considering their actual capital, would find their advantage in putting some check upon themselves in this matter. It might then be proper to raise the minimum of bills of the Bank of the United States to 10, 15, or 20 dollars, as in England there is no paper less than the five pound note. The National Bank, if it were powerful enough, would keep the local banks in check, and for this reason it is expedient to increase the capital. There would then be specie enough in the country for all purposes less than the paper minimum, and in case of any disturbance, the currency would be less readily deranged.

Nor is this the only point in which the charter of the Bank of the United States requires modification; its relations with the Federal government, as well as with the State governments, need to be modified; and some projects worthy of consideration, in this view, have been broached. It would also, probably, be expedient, as Mr Cambreleng has remarked, to change the rules and regulations relating to private and public deposits, and to provide that in future they should bear interest as they do in the Scotch banks. If this system were adopted by all the American banks, they would gain in solidity, and they would embrace the interest of all classes, and become provident institutions for the general good; while at present, their direct profits, the dividends, fall exclusively to the share-holders, who belong to the wealthier classes; a fact which contributes not a little to their unpopularity. Finally, it would be proper to consider to what degree the immediate advantages of credit might be extended to mechanics and farmers. In this respect the banks are yet absolutely aristocratical institutions, the Americans having preserved in banking almost all the usages of their ancestors, the English. The American banks are now chiefly devoted to the use of speculators and merchants.

In the midst of so many contradictions, it is difficult to foresee what will be the issue of the struggle. The friends of the Administration maintain that President Jackson and Vice President Van Buren are not only opposed to the Bank as it is, but to any National Bank, and that they will never yield. The Globe, the avowed organ of the President, has told Mr Clay, that unless he can find a Brutus (to assassinate General Jackson,) the Bank will neither have the deposits nor a new charter. We may doubt, however, whether the President's mind is so decisively made up, and after all a majority of both houses can set at nought the veto. As to the Vice President, whom his opponents call the cunning Van Buren, as he aspires to succeed the President, many persons declare that his object is to gain the vote of the powerful State of New York, by transferring thither the seat of the Mother Bank, but that he is too enlightened seriously to wish the destruction of an institution fraught with so much good to the country.

However this may be, it would be surprising if the present crisis were not followed, sooner or later, by a reaction in favour of the Bank of the United States with suitable modifications, or of another National Bank, which, as Mr Webster observed, would amount to the same thing, if the share-holders of the present Bank are not sacrificed. The jealous democracy of this country has this advantage over other democracies, that in the main it has much good sense; the recollection of old sufferings caused by the abuses of the banking system, and a jealousy of all pretensions to superiority, have led it to give ear to much noisy declamation about the aristocracy of money, particularly when it has been mixed up with flattery of itself. It may have been led astray for a moment, when its own prerogatives were the subject of discussion, as those sovereigns who assert the divine right of kings, take fire in respect to theirs. Proud of its gigantic labours, it may have been tempted to believe, that to it everything was possible and easy, that it had only to frown to cause the Bank to crumble into the dust at its feet, without being itself shaken by the shock. But facts, positive, inexorable facts now bear witness that it was mistaken, that it has trusted too much to its powers and its star, that the agency of the Bank of the United States is indispensable. The influence of facts has spread step by step even to the country people, who no longer find buyers of their produce. The argument is palpable and effectual; passion cannot long blind men of sense to such facts, for men of sense are those who do not give themselves up implicitly to abstractions, and who admit that every theory which is point blank against fact, is false or incomplete. This is the reason why good sense is worth to the full as much in politics, as talents.

It is worth while to observe here, that all the political difficulties in which the United States have become involved, and which have threatened the existence of the Union itself, have been settled by means of what are here called compromises, and in France justes-milieux. Thus was ended the serious dispute on the Missouri question, which had well nigh set the Union in a flame. It was made a question whether Missouri should be received into the Confederacy with a constitution sanctioning the institution of slavery. After a long and ineffectual debate, Mr Clay moved that Missouri should be admitted unconditionally, but that, at the same time, it should be declared that in future no new State lying north of 36° 30´ of latitude, should be admitted into the Union with this institution; this proposition was received with general favour, and the admission of Missouri was carried. In the next session, however, a new quarrel arose between the North and the South, more violent and bitter than the former, in relation to an article in the constitution of Missouri, prohibiting any free man of colour from entering the State. Another compromise, proposed by Mr Clay, finally settled the whole question in 1821, after it had kept the country in a flame for three years. In 1833, another compromise was made in respect to the tariff, the honour of which also belongs to Mr Clay. This question will sooner or later be settled in the same manner; the Union cannot do without a National Bank, and it will have one.

There are some lucky persons who succeed in everything, and there are some lucky nations with whom everything turns out well, even those events which seemed about to bury them in ruins. The United States is one of these privileged communities. When Villeroi came back to Versailles, after his defeat, Louis XIV. said to him, "Marshal, nobody is lucky at our time of life." Charles V. also, as he grew old, said that fortune was like a woman, and preferred young men to old ones. Louis and Charles were right so far as this, that when a man, young or old, has finished his mission, foresight, ability, and perseverance profit him little; he fails in whatever he undertakes, whilst he who has a mission yet to fulfil, takes new strength from the most violent blows. This is true of nations as well as of individuals. The American people is a young people, which has a mission to perform; nothing less than to redeem a world from savage forests, panthers, and bears. It moves with mighty strides towards its object, for it has not, like the nations of Europe, the burden of a heavy past on its shoulders. It may be checked in its career for a time by the present crisis, but it will come out of it safe and sound, and more healthy than when it entered it. It will come out with increased resources, with a reformed banking system, and according to all appearances, even with an improved National Bank. May the nations of Europe not have to wait long for institutions, which have so powerfully assisted England and America in their progress!

FOOTNOTES:

[M] The Savannah branch had out only 500,000 dollars in bills. The collector of the port accumulated them, as they were received for customs duties, and one day a broker presented himself at the counter with 380,000 dollars in bills, for which he demanded specie; but the disappearance of the bills of the branch from circulation had not been unnoticed, and funds had been provided for any exigency. Payment was, therefore, instantly made, and the broker, not knowing what to do with so much specie, was obliged to request the cashier to receive it in deposit.

[N] New York is the chief seat of commerce, but Philadelphia is more central, and is, besides, the city of American capitalists. The removal to New York would also require the transference of the mint and some other public offices to that city, at great expense.

[LETTER VI.]

PROGRESS OF THE STRUGGLE.—NEW POWERS.

Baltimore, March 1, 1834.

Failures begin to be frequent in the United States, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania; the great commercial and manufacturing houses are shaking. Meanwhile the Senators and Representatives in Congress are making speeches on the crisis, its causes, and consequences. Three months have already been taken up in discussing the question, whether the Secretary of the Treasury had or had not the right to withdraw the public deposits from the vaults of the Bank, without that institution having given any just cause of complaint, and merely because it was strongly suspected of aristocratical tendencies. The resolutions which have given rise to these debates, have been referred by the Senate to the Committee on Finance, and by the House to the Committee of Ways and Means. Debates will rise on the reports of these committees, on petitions and memorials, and incidental matters, and, I am told, will last two or three months longer. This slowness is at first glance difficult to be understood, among a people, which, above all things, strives to save time, and which is so much given to haste and despatch, that its most suitable emblem would be a locomotive engine or a steamboat, just as the Centaurs were anciently confounded with their horses. From all the large towns of the North, committees appointed by great public meetings, bring to Washington memorials signed by thousands, calling for prompt and efficient measures to put an end to the crisis. On the other hand, the partisans of the Administration find fault with the prolixity of the legislators. The calmness, or rather phlegm, which the Americans have inherited from their English ancestors, is kept undisturbed in both houses of Congress, and the solemn debate goes on. One speaker for example, Mr Benton, occupied four sessions, four whole days, with his speech, which led Mr Calhoun to observe, that the Senator from Missouri took up more time in expressing his opinion on a single fact, than the French people had done in achieving a revolution. But these interminable delays ought not to be too lightly condemned, and for myself I only shrug my shoulders, when I hear some impatient individuals asserting that Congress would be more expeditious, were it not for the eight dollars a day which they receive during the session. This delay may seem irreconcileable with one of the distinctive traits of the American character, but in reality is imperiously demanded by the form and spirit of the government, by the institutions and political habits of the country.

The general discussion in Congress has no other object than to open a full and free public inquest, which enables each and all to make up an opinion. It gives rise to a discussion of the question by the innumerable journals in the United States (where there are 1200 political newspapers), by the twentyfour legislatures, each composed of two houses, and by the public meetings in the cities and towns. It is an animated exchange of arguments of every calibre and every degree, of contradictory resolutions, mixed up with applauses and hisses, of exaggerated eulogies and brutal invectives. A stranger, who finds himself suddenly thrown into the midst of this hubbub, is confounded and stupefied; he seems to himself to be present in the primeval or the final chaos, or at least at the general breaking up of the Union. But after a certain time some gleams of light break forth from these thick clouds, from the bosom of this confusion,—gleams, which the good sense of the people hails with joy, and which light up the Congress. We see here the realization of the Forum on an immense scale, the Forum with its tumult, its cries, its pasquinades, but also with its sure instincts, and its flashes of native and untaught genius. It is a spectacle, in its details, occasionally prosaic and repulsive, but, as a whole, imposing as the troubled ocean. In a country like this, it is impossible to avoid these delays; first, because it takes a long time to interchange words between the frontiers of Canada and the Gulf of Mexico, and secondly, because nothing is so dangerous as precipitation in a Forum, whether it only covers the narrow space between the Rostra and the Tarpeian Rock, or extends from Lake Champlain to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from the Illinois to the Cape of Florida. Unfortunately the session in the Forum lasts longer than usual this time. The demagogues have set the popular passions in violent agitation; the sovereign people has allowed itself to be magnetised by its flatterers, and it will require some time to be able to shake off the trance. The healing beam, which will fix the gaze of the multitude and dissipate the charm that envelopes them, has not yet broke forth from the East, or from the West; meanwhile the merchants and manufacturers, who are stretched upon the coals, writhe in vain; there is no answer to their cries.

The Bank, meantime, disappears from sight and keeps silence; it continues to attend to its own business, and prudently confines itself to that alone. Its best policy is to avoid as much as possible making itself the subject of common talk. The demagogues have raised such a cry of monopoly and aristocracy, that the people have come to believe the Bank a colossus of aristocracy, a prop of monopoly. These words monopoly and aristocracy are here, what the word Jesuits was in France a few years ago; if the enemies of any institution can write on its back this kind of abracadabra, it is pointed at, hooted at, and hissed at by the multitude. Such is the magic power of these words, that speculators employ them on all occasions as charms to draw customers. For example, at the head of the advertisements of steamboats you read in staring characters: No Monopoly!!! It is pitiful to say that the Bank of the United States has a monopoly, when there are no less than five hundred other banks in the country; by this course of reasoning one might convict the sun of enjoying a monopoly of light. And yet the multitude has believed it, and believes it still. Now the best policy for those against whom such a storm of unpopularity is raised, is to run for port, as the sailors do in a gale of wind. The Bank has twice attempted to strike a blow, by taking advantage of the mistakes of its enemies, and both times the stroke has recoiled on itself.

The first time, the subject of dispute was a draft on the French government, which was sold to the Bank last year by the Federal government, and which France refused to pay; the draft was, therefore, protested, and then paid by the correspondent of the Bank in Paris in honour of the endorser. In this affair the Executive of the United States committed two faults: 1. It was an act of indiscretion to draw on the French government, before the Chambers had made the necessary appropriation for paying the stipulated indemnity; 2. Instead of drawing on the French government by a bill of exchange, and selling the bill to the Bank, without knowing whether it would be accepted, the Executive would have conducted itself with more propriety towards France, towards the Bank, and towards itself, if it had authorized the Bank to receive the moneys paid by the French government, in the capacity of its agent or attorney. By the commercial practice of all countries, and of this in particular, the Bank had a right to damages, and it put in its claim. Its object in taking this step, was much more to expose the errors of the Executive, than to pocket the sum of 50,000 or 80,000 dollars. But its adversaries immediately raised the cry, that the Bank was not contented with exacting enormous sums from the sweat of the people to the profit of the stockholders, (observe that the dividends of the Bank are moderate, compared with those of other banking companies in the country, and that the Federal government is itself the largest share-holder); but that it was now attempting, by petty chicanery, to extort a portion of the public revenue, and to bury the people's money in Biddle's pockets. To this reasoning, and it passes for demonstration, the multitude answered by imprecations against monopoly and the moneyed aristocracy, and by renewed shouts of Hurrah for Jackson!

A few days since we witnessed another episode of this kind. The Bank is charged, by act of Congress, with the duty of paying the pensions of the old soldiers of the revolution. It performs the service gratuitously, and it is notoriously a troublesome one. It has received several sums of money for this object, and at this moment has about 500,000 dollars in its vaults, intended for the next payments. The Administration, desirous of transferring this agency from the Bank, has demanded the funds, books, and papers connected with it. The Bank replied, that it has been made the depository of this trust by act of Congress, and that it cannot, ought not, and will not surrender it, unless in obedience to an act of Congress. The Bank was right; the refusal was founded in justice; but mark the consequences. Its adversaries express the greatest sympathy for these illustrious relics of the revolution, whom the arrogance of the Bank, as they say, is about to plunge, at the close of their career, into the most dreadful misery; they pour forth the most pathetic lamentations over these glorious defenders of the country, whom a money-corporation is about to strip of the provision made for their declining years by the nation's gratitude. You may imagine all the noisy arguments and patriotic harangues, that can be delivered on this text. On the 4th of February, the President sent a message to Congress in the same strain. All this is mere declamation, of the most common-place and the most hypocritical kind; for who will prevent the deliverers of America from duly receiving their pensions, except those who shall refuse them drafts on the Bank, which the Bank would pay at once? But a people under fascination is not influenced by reason, and it is at this moment believed by the multitude that the Bank has determined to kill the noble veterans of Independence by hunger. Once more, then, anathemas against monopoly, hatred to the moneyed aristocracy! Hurrah for Jackson! Jackson forever!

Whenever, therefore, the Bank has allowed itself to be drawn into a conflict, which is the enemy's country, it is pronounced to be in the wrong, though it were ten times right. On the contrary, when it has kept to its discounts and credits, it has always been able, without opening its mouth, to belie the charges of its enemies, who not only impute to it the atrocious crime of being suspected of aristocracy and monopoly, but attribute to it now the public distress, of which they denied the existence a few months ago, and of which they are themselves the authors. Very lately the Bank came to the relief of several local banks, which were in danger of failing, and a few days since it opened its coffers liberally to Allen & Co., one of the principal houses in the country, who, although having a capital much beyond the amount of their debts, were obliged, by the pressure of the times, to suspend payments; the failure of that house, which has no less than 24 branches, would have involved hundreds of others. This is the only way in which the Bank should assume the offensive; such acts, without a word of comment, would secure it the favour and the support of all impartial and enlightened men, and the gratitude of the commercial interest, much more completely than the most eloquent protests against the measures of this or that secretary, or the most ingenious and able defence of itself.

I am more and more convinced that the United States will reap advantage from this crisis; sooner or later the reform of the banking system must result from it. Very probably, the National Bank, if it is maintained, and the local banks, will hereafter be less absolutely separated from the Federal and State governments; that is to say, that the Federal and local governments will assume the control of the Banks, and consequently the banks will become a part of the governments. In this way many of the abuses of the banking system will be reformed, and the legitimate and just influence of the banks will be strengthened. It would be easy to cite numerous facts, which go to prove the tendency towards this result; thus in some of the States, the Legislatures have established, or are occupied in establishing banks, in which the State is a share-holder to the amount of one half or two fifths of the capital, appoints a certain number of the directors, and reserves to itself an important control over the operations. There are some States, as for example, Illinois, in which every other kind of bank is expressly forbidden by the constitution.

Republican publicists acknowledge only three classes of powers, the executive, legislative, and judicial; but it will soon be seen in the United States, that there is also a financial power, or at least the banks will form a branch of government quite as efficient as either of the others. The Bank of the United States is more essential to the prosperity of the country than the Executive, as now organized. The latter, conducts a little diplomatic intercourse, well or ill, with the European powers, nominates and removes some unimportant functionaries, manœuvres an army of 6,000 men in the western wilderness, adds now and then some sticks of timber to the dozen ships of war that are on the stocks at Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Norfolk, and Pensacola. All this might actually cease to be done without endangering the safety of the country, and without seriously wounding its prosperity, that is, its industry. But take from the country its institutions for the maintenance of credit, or only that which controls and regulates all the others, the Bank of the United States, and you plunge it into a commercial anarchy which would finally result in political anarchy.

The word politics cannot have the same meaning in the United States as in Europe. The United States, are not engaged, like the nations of Europe, in territorial combinations and the preservation of the balance of a continent, nor are they entangled in treaties of Westphalia or Vienna. They are free from all those difficulties, which in Europe arise from a difference of origin or religion, or from the conflict between rival pretensions, between old interests and new interests. They have no neighbour, which excites their suspicions. The policy of the United States consists in the extension of their commerce, and the occupation by agriculture of the vast domain, which nature has given them; in these points is involved the great mass of their general and individual interests; these are the objects which inflame their political and individual passions. As the Banks are the soul of their commerce, their rising manufactures, and even their agriculture, it is evident that the success of their politics is intimately and directly connected with the right organization of their banking system. The real government of the country, that is to say, the control of its essential interests, is as much in the banks as in any body or power established by the constitution. The time is come when this fact should be recognised and sanctioned. As among a military people the office of marshal or lord-high-constable is the first in the kingdom, so among a people which has nothing to do with war, and has only to employ itself with its industry, that of President of the central bank, for example, ought to be a public charge, political, in the sense adapted to the condition and wants of that people,—and one of the first rank in the country.

From this point of view, it may be said, that what is now passing in the United States, is a struggle in which the combatants are, on the one side, the military interest and the law, which have hitherto divided between them the control of public affairs, and on the other, the financial interest, which now claims its share in them; the two first have coalesced against the last, and have succeeded for a time in raising the multitude against it, but they will fail in the long run, since the multitude has more to gain from it than from them. It is said, that, when the committee of the New York merchants went to Washington to present a petition with 10,000 names in favour of the Bank, the President observed to them, that they declared the grievances of the brokers, capitalists, and merchants of Wall Street and Pearl Street, but that Wall Street and Pearl Street were not the people. I do not know whether the story is true or not, but I know that such an answer would express the opinion of the dominant party. There is a school here, which attempts to eliminate the wealthy classes from the people, and which is just the reverse of the old school of European Tories, which reduces the people to the higher classes, and excludes from that rank the greater number of the nation. And nothing can be more unjust, for in order to measure the real importance of the men of Pearl Street and Wall Street, it is only necessary to consider what New York would be without them.

In fifty years the population of New York has increased tenfold, its wealth probably an hundred fold; its animating influences have been felt for hundreds of miles around. This unparalleled growth is not the work of lawyers and military men; the merit belongs chiefly to the industry, the capital, the intelligence, and the enterprise of that, numerically speaking, insignificant minority of Wall Street and Pearl Street. It is very easy to cant about the aristocracy of dollars, and those filthy metals which men call gold and silver. And yet have not those vile metals ceased to be vile, when they are the fruit of the industry and enterprise of those who possess them? If there is a country in the world where it is preposterous to prate about the aristocracy of dollars, and about the filthy metals, it is this. For here, more than any where else, every body has some employment; whoever has capital is engaged in turning it to profit, and can neither increase nor even keep it without great activity and vigilance. A man's wealth is, therefore, very generally in the ratio of his importance, and even of his agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial capacity. The merchants are not without their faults; they are disposed to weigh everything in their doubloon-scales, and a people governed entirely by merchants would certainly be to be pitied. But a people governed by lawyers or by soldiers would be no happier and no freer. The policy of the Hamburg Senate in basely giving up unhappy political fugitives to the English executioner, deserves the contempt of every man of honour; but would the rule of Russian or even of Napoleon's bayonets, or the babbling anarchy of the Directory, be less loathsome to those whose heart beats with the love of liberty or with feelings of individual and national honour?

The revolutions of ages, which change religion, manners, and customs, modify also the nature of the powers that regulate society. Providence humbles the mighty, when they obstinately shut their eyes to the new spirit of the age, and raises up the lowly, whom this new spirit fires. Four thousand years ago, it was one of the most important dignities in Egypt to have the charge of embalming the sacred birds or of spreading the litter of the bull Apis. In the Eastern empire the post of protovestiary was one of the first in the state, and not to go so far back, it was the ambition of many in France, hardly four years ago, to become gentilhomme de la chambre, as the groom of the stole, or, in other words, the servant in charge of the wardrobe, is now one of the grand dignitaries of England. Nobody now-a-days embalms sacred birds, nobody spreads the litter of Apis. No one intrigues for the post of protovestiary or gentleman of the chamber, and from present appearances, I do not think that even the dignity of Groom of the Stole, will long be an object of ambition in England. There are no longer lord-high-constables, or great vassals, or knights-errant, or peers of France in the old sense of the word. The French aristocracy, so brilliant fifty years ago, has fallen like corn before the reaper. The mansions of the old heroes have become factories; the convents have been changed into spinning-works; I have seen Gothic naves in the best style of art transformed into workshops or granaries, and our brave troops have become peaceable labourers on the military roads.

Boards of petty clerks, whom the Castellans had employed to record their sovereign decrees, became in France parlements, which braved the kings and assumed to be guardians of the laws of the realm. At present the forge masters of Burgundy and the Nivernais, the distillers of Montpelier, the clothiers of Sedan and Elbeuf, have taken the place of the parlements. German princes, who can boast of their fifty quarters, dance attendance in the imperial, royal, or ministerial antechambers, while their Majesties or their Excellencies are conversing familiarly with some banker who has no patent of nobility, and who even disdains to oblige his royal friends by accepting one. The East India Company, a company of merchants if ever there was one, has more subjects than the emperors of Russia and Austria together. If in the Old World, where the old interests had marked every corner of the land with their stamp, the old interests, the military and the law, are thus obliged to come to terms with the new interest of industry, with the power of money, how can it be possible, that, in the New World, where the past has never taken deep root, where all thoughts are turned toward business and wealth, this same power will not force its way into the political scene, in spite of the opposition of its adversaries and its envious rivals?

[LETTER VII.]

RAILROADS IN AMERICA.

Richmond, (Va.) March 15, 1834.

Three thousand years ago the kings of the earth were happy; happy as a king; but the old proverb is now become a falsehood. Then no Constantinople was coveted; the citadels of Antwerp and Ancona were not built. No one troubled himself about the Rhenish frontier; the natural and simple Herodotus told marvellous tales, like those of the Arabian Nights, about the country watered by the Rhine. The banks of the Danube were trackless morasses; Vienna was not yet, nor of course the Treaty of Vienna. Peace reigned between the sovereigns, or at least their contests were real together academical, philosophical, and literary. The good king Nectanebus, an enlightened prince, a patron of the arts, played charades with his neighbours, the mighty monarchs of Asia; he guessed all their riddles without their being able to solve his in turn; his glory was unmatched, his people rolled in prosperity. The condition of men of letters and science was, to be sure, somewhat of the meanest; grammarians and philosophers were sometimes dragged to market with halters on their necks, to be sold like cattle, a treatment to which none but negroes are now subject. But if they were men of genius, their good star threw them into the hands of the best of masters, such as Xanthus, the most patient and kind of men, or good natured princes, like Nectanebus, who knew how to appreciate true merit. Æsop having become the property of this good king, soon got to be his counsellor, friend, and confidant, revised his charades and riddles, and suggested new ones to the king in such a modest way, that Nectanebus really believed himself the author of them. One day Nectanebus, by his advice, proposed to his rival monarchs this difficult problem; How would you build a city in the air? After they had puzzled their brains without success, Nectanebus prepared to give a solution of the question in the presence of the ambassadors of the Asiatic sovereigns solemnly convoked; Æsop put some little boys in baskets, which were carried up into the air by eagles trained for the purpose, and the boys began to cry out to the astonished ambassadors; "Give us stone and mortar, and we will build you a city." This old story has often occurred to my mind since I have been in the United States, and I have often said to myself, if Æsop's boys had been Americans, instead of having been subjects of king Nectanebus, they would, have demanded materials, not for building a city, but for constructing a railroad. In fact there is a perfect mania in this country on the subject of railroads.

While at Liverpool, I went aboard the Pacific to engage a berth, and Capt. Waite, a very worthy man, who believes in God with all his heart, and is not any the less on that account a very skilful commander, and a most intrepid sailor, offered me the latest American newspapers. The first I opened happened to be the Railroad Journal. Soon after sailing I fell sea-sick, and had scarcely a moment's relief till my arrival at New York; of all my recollections of the voyage, the most distinct is that of having heard the word railroad occurring once every ten minutes, in the conversation of the passengers. At New York, I went to visit the docks for building and repairing vessels; after having examined the dry dock and two or three other docks, my guide, himself an enthusiast on the subject of railroads, carried me to the railroad-dock, where the ships are moved along a railway. In Virginia, I found railroads at the bottom of the coal mines, which is not, indeed, new to a European. At Philadelphia I visited the excellent penitentiary, where everything was so neat, quiet, and comfortable, (if that word may be applied to a prison), in comparison with the abominable prisons in France, which are noisy, filthy, unhealthy, cold in winter, and damp in summer. The warden, Mr Wood, who manages the institution with great vigilance and philanthropy, after having shown me the prisoners' cells, the yards in which they take the air, the kitchen where the cooking is done by steam, and allowed me to visit one of the convicts, a poor fellow from Alsace, said to me, just as I was taking my leave; "But you have not seen everything yet, I must show you my railroad;" and in fact there was a railroad in the prison, for the cart in which food was brought to the prisoners.

Some days ago I happened to be in the little city of Petersburg, which stands at the falls of the Appomattox, and near which there is an excellent railroad. A merchant of the city took me to a manufactory of tobacco, in which some peculiar processes were employed. In these works was manufactured that sort of tobacco which most Americans chew, and will chew for some time to come, in spite of the severe, but in this matter just, censures of English travellers, unless the fashion of vetoes should spread in the United States, and the women should set theirs on the use of tobacco, with as unyielding a resolution, as the President has shown towards the Bank. After having wandered about the workshops amidst the poor little slaves by whom they are filled, I was stopping to look at some of these blacks, who appeared to me almost white, and who had not more than one eighth of African blood in their veins, when my companion said to me, "As you are interested in railroads, you must see the one belonging to the works." Accordingly we went to the room where the tobacco is packed in kegs, and subjected to a powerful pressure. The apparatus for pressing is a very peculiar contrivance, which I will not now stop to describe, but of which the most important part is a moveable railroad, suspended from the ceiling. Thus the Americans have railroads in the water, in the bowels of the earth, and in the air. The benefits of the invention are so palpable to their practical good sense, that they endeavour to make an application of it everywhere and to everything, right or wrong, and when they cannot construct a real, profitable railroad across the country from river to river, from city to city, or from State to State, they get one up, at least, as a plaything, or until they can accomplish something better, under the form of a machine.

The distance from Boston to New Orleans is 1600 miles, or twice the distance from Havre to Marseilles. It is highly probable, that within a few years this immense line will be covered by a series of railroads stretching from bay to bay, from river to river, and offering to the ever-impatient Americans the service of their rapid cars at the points where the steamboats leave their passengers. This is not a castle in the air, like so many of those grand schemes which are projected amidst the fogs of the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne; it is already half completed. The railroad from Boston to Providence is in active progress; the work goes on à l'Américaine, that is to say, rapidly. From New York to Philadelphia, there will soon be not only one open to travel, but two in competition with each other, the one on the right, the other on the left bank of the Delaware; the passage between the two cities will be made in seven hours, five hours on the railroad, and two in the steamboat, in the beautiful Hudson and the magnificent Bay of New York, which the Americans, who are not afflicted with modesty, compare with the Bay of Naples. From Philadelphia, travellers go to Baltimore by the Delaware and Chesapeake, and by the Newcastle and Frenchtown railroad, in eight hours; from Baltimore to Washington, a railroad has been resolved upon, a company chartered, the shares taken, and the work begun, all within the space of a few months. Between Washington and Blakely, in North Carolina, 60 miles of railroad are completed, from Blakely northwards. A company has just been chartered to complete the remaining space, that is, from Richmond to the Potomac, a distance of 70 miles, and the Potomac bears you to the Federal city by Mt. Vernon, a delightful spot, the patrimony of George Washington, where he passed his honoured old age, where his body now reposes in a modest tomb. Between Washington and Blakely, those who prefer the steamboats, may take another route; by descending the Chesapeake to Norfolk, they will find another railroad, 70 miles in length, of which two thirds are now finished, and which carries them to Blakely, and even beyond. Blakely is a new town, which you will not find on any map, born of yesterday; it is the eldest, and as yet the only daughter of the Petersburg and Blakely railroad. From Blakely to Charleston the distance is great, but the Americans are enterprising, and there is no region in the world in which railroads can be constructed so easily and so cheaply; the surface has been graded by nature, and the vast forests which cover it, will furnish the wood of which the railroad will be made; for here most of these works have a wooden superstructure. From Charleston, a railroad 137 miles in length, as yet the longest in the world, extends to Augusta, whence to Montgomery, Alabama, there is a long interval to be supplied. From this last town steamboats descend the River Alabama to Mobile, and those who do not wish to pay their respects to the Gulf of Mexico, on their way to New Orleans, will soon find a railroad which will spare them the necessity of offering this act of homage to the memory of the great Cortez.[O]

Within ten years this whole line will be completed, and traversed by locomotive engines, provided the present crisis terminates promptly and happily, as I hope it will. Ten years is a long time in these days, and a plan, whose execution requires ten years, seems like a romance or a dream. But in respect to railroads, the Americans have already something to show. Pennsylvania, which by the last census, in 1830, contained only 1,348,000 inhabitants, has 325 miles of railroads actually completed, or which will be so within the year, without reckoning 76 miles which the capitalists of Philadelphia have constructed in the little States of New Jersey and Delaware. The total length of all the railroads in France is 95 miles, that is, a little more than what the citizens of Philadelphia, in their liberality, have given to their poor neighbours. In the State of New York, whose population is the most adventurous and the most successful in their speculations, there are at present only four or five short railroads, but if the sixth part of those which are projected and authorized by the Legislature, are executed, New York will not be behind Pennsylvania in this respect. The merchants of Baltimore, which at the time of the Declaration of Independence contained 6,000 inhabitants, and which now numbers 100,000, have taken it into their heads to make a railroad between their city and the Ohio, a distance of above 300 miles. They have begun it with great spirit, and have now finished about one third of the whole road. In almost every section east of the Ohio and the Mississippi, there are railroads projected, in progress, or completed, and on most of them locomotive steam-engines are employed. There are some in the Alleghanies, whose inclined planes are really terrific, from their great inclination; these were originally designed only for the transportation of goods, but passenger-cars have been set up on them, at the risk of breaking the necks of travellers. There are here works well constructed and ill constructed; there are some that have cost dear, (from 40,000 to 50,000 dollars a mile,) and others that have cost little, (from 10,000 to 15,000 dollars a mile). New Orleans has one, a very modest one to be sure, it being only five miles long, but it will soon have others, and after all, it is before old Orleans, for the latter has yet to wait till its capitalists, seized with some violent fit of patriotism, shall be ready to make the sacrifice of devoting some ten or twelve per cent. of their capital to the construction of a railroad thence to Paris. Virginia, whose population is nearly the same with that of the Department of the North, and which is inferior in wealth, already has 75 miles of railroad fully completed, and 110 in progress, exclusive of those begun this year. The Department of the North, where it would be quite as easy to construct them, and where they would be more productive, has not a foot completed, or in progress, and hardly a foot projected. Observe, moreover, that I here speak of railroads alone, the rage for which is quite new in America, while that for canals is of very old date (for in this country fifteen years is an age), and has achieved wonders. There are States which contain 500, 800, or 1,000 miles of canals. We in France are of all people the boldest in theory and speculation, and we have made the world tremble by our political experiments; but during the last twenty years we have shown ourselves the most timid of nations in respect to physical improvements.

FOOTNOTES:

[O] For observations on these statements see Letter XXI., and the Notes.

[LETTER VIII.]

THE BANKS.—THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION.

Washington, April 10, 1834.

The drama which has been passing in the United States since the opening of the session, has now reached the end of the first act. The two Houses have had under consideration the subject of the removal of the public deposits from the Bank of the United States to the local banks, by the Executive, and both of them have come to a decision. The Senate has declared, by a majority of 28 to 18, that the reasons alleged by the Secretary of the Treasury in justification of the measure, were neither satisfactory nor sufficient, and, by a majority of 26 to 20, that the conduct of the President in this matter was neither conformable to the constitution nor to the laws. This is the first instance, since the adoption of the Federal constitution, of a censure of the chief magistrate of the nation by the Senate. The House has resolved, on its part, that the charter of the Bank ought not to be renewed, that the public deposits ought not to be restored to it, and that they should remain in the safe-keeping of the local banks. The first resolve passed by a vote of 132 to 92; the majority for the two others was much less, 118 to 103, and 117 to 105. It has been resolved, by a large majority, 171 to 42, that the conduct of the Bank should be made a subject of investigation, but this majority includes many friends of the Bank.

It is to be hoped that the Bank will not be the object of this campaign; the more vigourously it is defended, the more hateful it becomes to the democracy. Those who feel an interest in their country and its institutions, ought to make an effort to turn the debate toward some other point, for both sides have become heated and exasperated in the struggle, and already violence has been threatened. The most brilliant services have been forgotten, the purest characters trampled under foot. The Globe, the avowed organ of the administration, pours forth the vilest slanders on men, such as Messrs Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, of whom any country in the world would be proud. It repeated, and unhappily it reiterates still, that the votes of, the Senate have been bought by the Bank. On the other hand, General Jackson, to whom it is impossible to deny the possession of eminent qualities, has been himself exposed to the vilest indignities; the gray hairs of that brave old man have been insulted in the most scandalous manner. Attempts have even been made to throw ridicule on his victory at New Orleans, the most brilliant affair in the American annals, as if his glory were not the common property of the country. Some hot heads have even talked of recurring to violence; commerce and enterprise have been struck numb; for want of means, the great works of Pennsylvania have been in danger of being brought to a stand. But at present there appears to be a general wish to bring back a calm; the failure of a certain number of individuals, and especially that of some banks, have proved a signal of alarm, which has recalled every one to a sense of the common danger, the general ruin that threatened the country. There has been a failure of a bank in Florida, of one in New Jersey, and of two in Maryland, one of which, that of the Bank of Maryland in Baltimore, has caused a great sensation. The leading men of all parties have set themselves in earnest to search out some means of bringing the commercial crisis to an end. There is room to hope, therefore, that the debate will lose its bitterness, and at the same time will take a wider range; instead of quarrelling about the particular question of the Bank, it were to be wished that the higher questions of political economy should be discussed, such as that of a mixed currency, in which there should be the proper mixture of paper and the metals necessary to give it stability, without keeping, as is the case in Europe, a large unproductive capital in the shape of specie; and that of a system of institutions of credit, banks of loan and discount, of deposit and exchange, powerful enough to serve as a spring and a stay to the industry of the country, and yet so balanced in respect to each other and the powers of the government, as not to be dangerous to the public liberties. A very able speech of Mr Calhoun's has already drawn the general attention to the subject of financial reform, and one of the senators friendly to the administration, Mr Benton, has embodied some of Mr Calhoun's ideas in the shape of a bill.

It is now universally agreed, that to obtain a solid and stable currency, it is necessary to keep a certain quantity of gold and silver in the country; it is seen that while there are paper dollars, the silver dollars will disappear, that ten-dollar notes necessarily expel the eagles, and that half-eagles will not stay where there are five-dollar bills. It is, therefore, proposed to abolish the issue of notes of less than ten or even twenty dollars, but all that Congress can do without the aid of a National Bank, is to prohibit the reception, by the collectors of the customs, of the bills of any bank which has in circulation notes of less than ten or twenty dollars; for Congress has no direct power over the local banks. This measure, however, would be insufficient; for the amount of money paid for customs bears a very small proportion to the whole circulation of the country, and consequently would not affect the circulation in districts remote from the sea coast. The Administration does not deny the necessity of a police for controlling and regulating the banks; it seems disposed to effect it by means of some of the local banks, which should act under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, and to which should be granted certain privileges, such as that of being the depositories of the public money without paying interest. But this plan has some disadvantages; it would invest the Secretary, that is the President, with a great discretionary power, which is wholly at war with the political maxims of American government. It is a received truth in the United States, that the sword and the purse ought not to be in the same hands. Beside it is doubtful whether this control would be sufficiently powerful and sufficiently enlightened, and finally it would be difficult by means of this chain of local banks to answer one of the most pressing wants of the country, facility of exchange; because they are, and must be as slightly connected with each other, as the sovereign States from which they hold their charters. To exterminate small bank-notes the surest agent would be a National Bank, and Congress has the power to establish one. This power, which is disputed because all its powers are disputed, would not be contested, if it were stipulated that the Bank should obtain the consent of each State, before establishing a branch within its limits. It would then be sufficient that the Bank should not receive the bills of any other bank, which issued notes of less than 10 or 20 dollars, or which received the bills of other banks, that issued notes less than the same minimum. In fine, a National Bank is an admirable instrument of exchange, and the most influential friends of the Administration are convinced of the necessity of an institution of the sort. I cannot believe that the President, and especially the Vice-President, are really as much opposed to one, as they have the air of being. As it is possible to conceive of a combination of circumstances, which may reconcile its existence with the interests and views of Mr Van Buren (such would be, for instance, the creation of a Bank of which the seat should be New York, instead of Philadelphia), it may be hoped that sooner or later, under one form or another, Mr Van Buren may yield to the necessity of the case. It is true that out of hatred to the present Bank, the prejudices of the multitude have been excited against the establishment of any bank at all, and it is much more easy to rouse the popular passions than to control them when once let loose; this kind of game has resulted in the self-murder of many a man's popularity. But in this matter the voice of the public interest and of individual interest will speak so loud, that it would be astonishing if it did not make itself heard by a people, so much more sensible and reflecting than most of the European people. There is, then, in short, still some chance for a Bank of the United States.

The following are the principal features, in which both parties seem to me to be at present tacitly agreed. The capital of the Bank to be about 50 millions. The shares of the present Bank, representing a capital of 35 millions, to be exchanged at par for shares in the new bank; the rest of the capital to be subscribed by the individual States, thus giving the Bank a more truly national character: The rate of discount to be reduced from 6 to 5 per cent.; Mr Forsyth, a Senator friendly to the administration, has demanded this modification: The laws relative to public and private deposits to be changed in conformity with the propositions of Mr Cambreleng: The seat of the mother bank to be transferred to New York: The operations of the Bank to be subjected to more strict regulations than those of the old Bank have been: The Bank to be required to keep on hand a larger amount of reserved profits, or some other provision borrowed from the bank of England to be adopted, in order to give more security to the institution.

It would not, probably, be impossible to unite a majority of the two Houses in favour of a plan which should embrace these features. But there is another subject about which little is said, and upon which no one has yet publicly declared himself, although there are many who have thought much about it, and it will not be easy to reconcile opinions upon it. How shall the Bank be governed? What relation shall there be between the administration of the Bank, and the Federal and State governments? How and by whom shall the President of the Bank be chosen? This subject, about which there is a total silence, appears to me to be of so vital importance, that I am convinced that what has occurred in the United States during the last six months, would never have taken place, if the nomination of the President of the Bank had been lodged with the President of the United States. In Europe and particularly in France, the government of the banks is more or less in the hands and under the control of the king and the ministers. In America, conformably with the principles of self-government, the Bank, like all the other industrial and financial institutions, has, up to this time, governed itself. The Federal government, owning one fifth of the shares, names one fifth of the directors; its powers stop there. The American axiom, which forbids the union of the sword and the purse in the same hand, is opposed to the exercise of a controlling influence over the choice of the President of the Bank by the President of the United States; and yet I am persuaded that the democratic party will not be willing to hear of a Bank, in the government of which it could not interfere.

The upper classes (bourgeoisie) are not here what they are in Europe; while in Europe they rule, here they are ruled. Democracy takes its revenge in America for the unjust contempt with which it has been so long treated in Europe. Now it is to these upper classes, that the private share-holders of the Bank belong; it is the merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists, who will always derive the most direct benefit from a National Bank, although all classes must indirectly derive great advantages from it. From the time when the upper classes sanctioned a completely universal suffrage, without making any exception in favour of natural superiority, whether industrial or scientific, from the day when they consented that number should be every thing, and knowledge and capital nothing, they have signed their own abdication. It is too late to agitate the questions, whether this is absolutely a good or an evil, or whether it is well, in the agricultural States, with a scattered population, such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and bad in large and populous cities, the seats of a vast commerce, such as Philadelphia and New York. This is a matter already settled past recall; when the sword is surrendered, the vanquished must submit to take the law from the victor. In case, then, of the creation of a new National Bank, the share-holders must consent to receive their head, either from the President and Senate, as other public functionaries are appointed, or from the House of Representatives alone, or from some other similar source. If in a new or a somewhat modified Bank, the Federal and local governments should be stockholders to a large amount, this participation of the President or the House of Representatives, or of special delegates chosen by the States, in the government of the Bank, would appear altogether natural, even in the eyes of the most exclusive partisans of self government. It remains to be seen, whether in this case, the Bank would not be more likely to become the instrument of party, a den of intrigue and corruption, a golden calf, a monster, as it is so often unjustly called, than in the present state of things.

If this quarrel should be terminated by a compromise, we may expect that it will be effected on the basis above stated. The upper classes will, perhaps, consider the conditions as hard, but they should beware of rejecting them. It would be a great gain to them to obtain, under any form, a decisive sanction of a National Bank, connected with the government, and therefore incorporated with the interests of the country. Not only are numbers at present against the Bank, and numbers give the law here, but the Opposition is not so well organised as the democratic party. The Opposition has, indeed, three leaders, who do not always agree; the views of Mr Calhoun of South Carolina do not coincide with those of Messrs Clay and Webster on the subjects of the tariff and States' rights; and Mr Clay, the son of the west, and Mr Webster, who comes from Boston, the focus of Federalism, differ on several constitutional questions. The democratic party, on the contrary, is better disciplined; the two heads, General Jackson and Mr Van Buren, present a formidable union of qualities and faculties. The old General is firm, prompt, bold, energetic; Mr Van Buren, who sets up for the American Talleyrand, is mild, conciliating, prudent, and sagacious; his adversaries call him the little magician. While the pretensions of Messrs Clay, Calhoun, and Webster are scarcely to be reconciled with each other, and neither of them is willing to be second, Mr Van Buren is ready to serve under General Jackson for the purpose of becoming his successor in the elections of 1836. Every kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. But, if no compromise can be made, if the democracy is too untractable, and the upper classes persist in claiming more than their position authorises them to do, if the feelings, kept in a state of excitement, become exasperated on both sides, and the contest be too much prolonged, the most frightful consequences may ensue; even the Union may be endangered.

At the close of the war of Independence, the American Confederacy occupied only a narrow strip along the Atlantic. Since that time the wave of an active, enterprising, and rapidly increasing population, has rolled over the Alleghanies, the Ohio, the Mississippi, more recently over the Missouri, the Red River, the Arkansas, and I know not how far. Toward the South it is already sweeping over the Sabine, and covering Texas, while toward the West, it has topped the Rocky Mountains, and is approaching the Pacific shore. Instead of thirteen States, there are twentyfour, and the number will soon be increased to twentysix. By the side of the old Atlantic strip, two other vast tracts with a more fertile soil, have yielded up their riches to civilised man; one, at the west, comprises the great triangle lying between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the lakes, and the other at the south, includes the fertile regions of Florida and Louisiana, which, under the French and Spanish rule, were a solitary wilderness. The geographical centre of the Union fifty years ago was on the banks of the Potomac, on the spot where the city of Washington—that paper capital—now stands; it is now at Cincinnati, and will soon be near St Louis. In proportion as the territory of the Confederacy has been extended, the Federal bond has been weakened. It was nearly snapped asunder during the Nullification crisis, occasioned by the resistance of South Carolina to the tariff adopted under the influence of New England, in order to protect her growing manufactures. If Congress had not satisfied the demands of South Carolina, Virginia would have made common cause with the latter, and her example would have carried the whole South. The patriotic eloquence of Mr Webster, the moderation of Mr Clay and his prodigies of parliamentary strategy, the efforts of Mr Livingston, then Secretary of State, the firm, and, at the same time, conciliatory conduct of the President, who, for the first time, heard a bold defiance with patience, and the calm attitude of the Northern States, prevented for the moment a general dissolution of the Union; but the germ of mischief remains; the charm is broken; the ear has become familiar with the ominous word SEPARATION. A habit has grown up of thinking, and even of declaring, whenever the interests of the North and the South jar, that the cure-all will be a dissolution of the Union.

South Carolina keeps her militia organised, and exacts from the State officers a special oath of allegiance. Georgia and Alabama contest the validity of treaties concluded between the Federal government and the Cherokee and Creek nations. (See Note 11.) Most of the States seek to extend the limits of their individual sovereignty. The doctrine of State rights has even insinuated itself into the bosom of orthodox Philadelphia, for I see by the journals, that a States' rights dinner is announced there. These symptoms may become full of danger in a moment of universal excitement. When the passions are at the helm, there is no pause in the course. What, for instance, would be the event, if Nullification should find an echo in the same States of the North, where it has lately been so firmly rejected? It is they that have the most direct interest in the establishment of a National Bank; it is they that suffer most from the financial combinations of General Jackson, and from the objections of Southern statesmen against the constitutionality of a bank. Although no allusion is made to this danger, it is evident that the solicitude of many persons has been aroused by it, and it is fortunate that it is so, for a more general disposition to conciliatory measures is the consequence.

The principle of separation is engaged in a deadly conflict with the spirit of centralisation or consolidation; hardly was the constitution signed, when twelve additional articles or Amendments were immediately adopted, almost all of which contained restrictions on the powers and attributes of the Federal government. At the same time the authority of Congress to charter a Bank, and give it powers within the territories of the States, was contested; on this point, however, the principle of union was victorious, and the Bank was established. Next, the right of engaging in Internal Improvements was denied to Congress, which, after a long struggle, has been compelled to resign its claims; General Jackson willed it, and it was done. The National Road, which extends from Washington to the western wilderness, and for which appropriations have been annually voted, each professing to be the last, shows what the Federal government could do and wished to do. Even the uniform system of weights and measures, seems to be on the point of being broken up, in spite of the express provisions of the constitution. Pennsylvania has undertaken, nobody knows why, to establish regulations on this point contrary to the general usage.[P] The public debt is now paid; that is one Federal tie the less. The Bank, assailed afresh, is on the point of falling; that is an immense loss to the Federal principle. The Supreme Court of the United States, one of the bulwarks of the Union, is assaulted. The vast domain of the West, (see Note 12,) the national property, seems in danger of being given up to individual States, for this disposition is one of the favorite topics of the democratic party.

But if centralisation comes off the worse in Federal politics, it has the better within the States. The principal States are engaged in constructing vast systems of internal communication; they are establishing for themselves financial systems, and many of them are about to set up great banks, which shall exercise within their respective limits the salutary influence possessed by the Bank of the United States throughout the whole Union. Thus each State, as it detaches itself from the Federal Union, organises more fully its own powers, and binds more firmly together its imperfectly combined elements. But, on the other hand, industry and the spirit of enterprise restore to the Union the strength, of which political jealousy and party quarrels tend to deprive it. There is not a family at the North, that has not a son or a brother in the South; the community of interests daily grows stronger; commerce is a centripetal force; along the whole Atlantic coast there is only one mart, New York; there is only one of importance on the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans; and the relations of New York and New Orleans make these two cities, instead of rivals, mutual supports. The railroads and the steamboats spread over the country the meshes of a net not easily broken; great distances vanish; before long it will be easy to go from Boston to New Orleans in eight days, less time than is generally required to go from Brest to Marseilles. When we reflect on the extent of the Roman empire for ages, we cannot doubt the possibility of maintaining a certain degree of unity on the American territory, immeasurably vast as it appears to an eye accustomed to the divisions of the map of Europe. The Romans had not attained that degree of perfection in the means of intercourse which we possess; not only had they no knowledge of steamboats and railroads, and the telegraph, but they had few highways, and were unacquainted with the use of carriages hung on springs. The progress of commercial and financial arts, makes it more easy to manage the financial concerns of the universe now, than it was to administer those of a province in the time of Cæsar. I cannot, therefore, make up my mind to believe, that the Union will be broken up into fragments, driven in different directions and dashing one against another.

And yet it is very possible, that the Union will not continue long on its present footing. Are the relations established between the States by the constitution of 1789, the most perfect that can be devised now? Ought not the unforeseen formation of the two great groups of the West and the Southwest be followed by some modification of those relations? Would not the subdivision of the general confederacy into three subordinate confederacies, conformable to the three great territorial divisions, the North, the South, and the West, with a more intimate union between the members of each group, have the effect of satisfying the advocates of State rights, without endangering the principle of union? Would not this arrangement be the means of giving more elasticity to the Union? Could not the existence of three partial confederacies be reconciled with that of a central authority, invested with the undisputed powers of the present Federal government, one army, one navy, one diplomatic representation abroad, one common right of citizenship, one Supreme Court, and, as far as possible, one system of customs, and one Bank? These are questions, which it will, perhaps, be worth while to examine some day, and even at no distant day. But it would be desirable, that they should be approached and discussed with calmness. If they should be unexpectedly raised in a period of irritation and bad feelings, they would be the signal of a deplorable catastrophe. Union gives strength; North America, once parcelled out into hostile fragments, would be of no more weight in the balance of the world, than the feeble republics of South America.

FOOTNOTES:

[P] An act has been passed by the Pennsylvania legislature, providing that 2,000 pounds shall make a ton.

[LETTER IX.]

THE FIRST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.

Philadelphia, April 24, 1834.

Which is the first people in the world? There is no nation which does not make pretensions to this superiority. Who in France has not sung in the words of Béranger, "Queen of the world, oh my country! oh France!" in the full conviction, that the French nation was predestined to be forever at the head of the human race, to eclipse all others, in peace and in war? For myself, before I had crossed the frontier, I believed most implicitly, that we were not only the most generous and chivalric of people, the most intellectual and ingenious, the first in the fine arts, the most amiable and brilliant; but also that we were the most enlightened, the first in political and industrial arts, the most inventive and the most practical, in short, the pattern-nation, perfect and unrivalled. Notwithstanding the rains and fogs of Paris, I supposed our climate the mildest and the most serene in the world; in spite of the Landes and Champagne, I considered it undeniable, that our soil was the most fertile, our scenery the most picturesque, in the world. Trusting to the reports of our exhibitions of industrial skill, I was ready to swear that we had left our neighbours of England a hundred leagues behind, and that their manufacturers, to avoid being reduced to beggary by our competition, would soon be obliged to come over to learn how to smelt and refine iron, how to spin cotton, how to manufacture steel, how to manage the most gigantic establishments in the most economical manner, how to despatch mountains of merchandise beyond sea most expeditiously.

After having crossed the frontier one gradually lowers these magnificent pretensions; patriotism becomes purer and stronger. In visiting foreign parts one sees what is wanting to the prosperity and glory of his country, and how it might be possible to add some jewels to her crown. Thus it does not require long observation to see, that if England might borrow much from us, we have not less to receive from her. The English are not only more skilful manufacturers and better merchants than we are, but they possess in a higher degree than we do, those qualities which enable men, after having conceived grand projects, to carry them into execution. The English have that practical sagacity and that unbending perseverance, by which our Titan-like battles of the Revolution and the Empire, our impetuous and devoted enthusiasm, our unparalleled victories, our unmatched triumphs, were reduced to treaties of Vienna, that is to say, were made to result in our own humiliation, and in the enthronement of Great Britain on the apex of the European pyramid. The English have less of the gift of speech, but more capacity for action, than we have. And it is owing to this, that they have found means to extend their colonial possessions, while all other nations were losing theirs; what they lost in the West, they have supplied in the East tenfold. They possess that political sense, to which they owe the peaceful settlement, during the last three years, of questions, that seemed destined to shake the granite foundations of their island and bury it in the sea. They have achieved their Reform; they have abolished the monopoly of the East India Company; they have reconstructed the Bank; they have abolished slavery. During this period, we have been revolving about questions of secondary importance, without being able to make a decision; we do not know how to go to work with monopolies, which, in comparison with the colossal privileges of the East India Company, are grains of sand; we, who have given to the world the most conclusive arguments in favour of liberty of commerce!

If in Paris, we consider ourselves, in all, and for all, and forever, the pattern-people, at London, the opinion is not less exclusively and decidedly in favour of the English. In London, the duke of Wellington is called the conqueror of Napoleon, which, indeed, is true to the letter, but is nevertheless perfectly ridiculous, although Lord Wellington is certainly an extraordinary man. I have seen Englishmen pettishly shake their head, when they were told that the sky of England was foggy; with a little malice, one might drive them to maintain, that they need not envy the climate of Italy, and that even the atmosphere of Manchester, where the sight of the sun is a rarity, has charms, in spite of the slanders of its detractors, even for those who have breathed the air of Naples. At Madrid, that heroic people, which seems to be awaking at last from its long lethargy, has not lost the habit of believing in the supremacy of Spain, and there, they dream that they are yet in the glorious days of Charles V., when the sun never sat on the Spanish dominions. And we can pardon this in the noble Castilians; but I verily believe, also, that Don Pedro and Don Miguel, those interminable pretenders, have each an official journal which tells them daily, that the breathless universe has its eyes fixed on their ragged armies, and that the destinies of the world are settled at Santarem and Setubal. At Constantinople, in the capital of an empire which exists only because the other European powers cannot agree in the division of the spoils, they call us Christian dogs. In Rome the people still call themselves Romans, and this ridiculous misnomer really makes the Trans-Tiberine populace believe, that military glory is yet the lot of the country, and that the Romans will soon resume the character of lords of the world, magnanimously raising the humble and crushing the pride of the powerful (Parcere subjectis, &c.)! In Vienna, on the contrary, everybody thinks that Rome is no longer in Rome, but that it is, of right and in fact, in the archducal capital, that the emperor is heir by lineal descent to Augustus and Trajan. The devise of an early prince of the house of Austria (A. E. I. O. U.),[Q] attests that this pretension is almost as old as the house of Hapsburg. In Prussia, meanwhile, the young nobles, proud of having studied at the great universities of Jena and Berlin, and of having worn the sword in an army which was once the great Frederic's, affect an utter disdain for the Austrians. Elated by the rapid extension of their country, which has not, however, yet reached its full growth, the Prussians look upon their sandy land as the cradle of a new civilisation. It seems as if the waters of the Spree had some miraculous qualities, and that whoever has not tasted them, has but four senses instead of five. At St. Petersburg and Moscow, no one doubts, that the sword of the emperor, thrown into the scales of the world's destinies, would at once overbear the opposite balance. Perhaps we of Western Europe have done our part in filling the Russians with these high notions of the influence of the Czar. Thus in Europe, each nation arrogates to itself the first rank, and I do not see why the Americans should be more modest than the people on the other side of the Atlantic. The miracles which they have accomplished in fifty years give them a right to be proud, and they, also, in their turn, are persuaded that they are the first people in the world, and they boast loudly of their preëminence.

The fact is, there is no chosen people, on whom superiority is entailed for ages. The Jewish nation, in which this notion of predestination seemed to be most deeply rooted, has for centuries afforded the most melancholy refutation of the doctrine. Since the age of Richelieu and the Revolution of 1688, that is, since Spain has fallen asleep, France and England have been at the head of civilisation, and have divided the supremacy between themselves; the one ruling by the theoretical, the other by the practical; the one giving the tone in politics, the other in taste, the arts, and manners. But what were France and England three centuries ago, in the time of Charles V., when the generals of that emperor and king slew Bayard at Rebecque, made Francis I. prisoner at Pavia, and the Pope in Rome, whilst four thousand miles further west, Cortez was conquering for him the proud empire of Montezuma? Prussia, who now divides with Austria the dominion of Germany, and who is worthy of that dignity, who is the youthful, the aspiring, the ambitious Germany, full of the future, as Austria is the patriarchal, sober, prudent, conservative Germany, clinging to the past and the old,—what was Prussia three generations ago? What shall we all be, French, English, Prussians, and Austrians three centuries hence, or perhaps one hundred years hence? Who can say that some northern blast, finding us divided, and enfeebled by our divisions, will not have laid low those who are now so high and haughty? Who knows if the vigourous race which is now bursting forth from this virgin soil, will not then have passed us in their turn, as we have outstripped our predecessors? Who can foretell, whether the two gigantic figures that are now rising above the horizon, the one in the East with one foot on Moscow and one just ready to fall on Constantinople, the other in the West, as yet half hidden by the vast forests of the New World, whose huge limbs stretch from the mouths of the St. Lawrence to those of the Mississippi: who can foresee, whether these youthful Titans, who are watching each other across the Atlantic, and already touch hands on the Pacific, will not soon divide the empire of the world?

Civilisation is a treasure, to which each generation adds something in transmitting it to its heirs, and which passes from hand to hand, from people to people, from country to country. Setting out from Asia it was four thousand years in reaching the borders of the Atlantic Ocean. Wo to the nations, that having become depositaries of the treasure, instead of keeping it with watchful care and labouring to increase it, lay it down by the road-side, and waste their time and strength in foolish quarrels; for they will soon be robbed of their trust! The Americans are the most enterprising of men, and the most aspiring of people; if we continue to be swallowed up in our barren disputes, they are the people to snatch from us at unawares the precious charge of the destinies of our race, and to place themselves at the head of its march.

Each people has its qualities, which are developed by education, which at certain moments shine with peculiar brilliancy, like a beacon light towards which the eyes of mankind are directed, and by which its march is guided, and which always command the esteem or love or respect of others. The people of the United States most undeniably have theirs. No people is so peculiarly fitted by its intrinsic character, as well as by the circumstances of the territory and the condition of the population, for democratic institutions. The Americans possess, therefore, in the highest degree, the better features of democracy, and they have also its inseparable defects; but if there is something in them to blame, there is still more to praise. There is much here for a European to learn, who should come to seek, not subjects for fault-finding, satire, and sarcasm (which have become vulgar common-places, since the small coin of Voltaire and Byron has passed through so many hands), but positive facts, which might be imitated in our old countries, with the necessary modifications required by the difference between our circumstances and the condition of America. Almost all English travellers in this country have seen a great deal that was bad and scarcely any thing good; the portrait they have drawn of America and the Americans, is a caricature, which, like all good caricatures, has some resemblance to the original. The Americans have a right to deny the jurisdiction of the tribunal, for they have a right to be tried by their peers, and it does not belong to the most complete aristocracy in Europe, the English aristocracy, to sit in judgment on a democracy. Yet all the English travellers in America have belonged to the aristocracy by their connexions or their opinions, or were aspiring to it, or aped its habits and judgments, that they might seem to belong to it.

A Yorkshire farmer or a Birmingham mechanic would certainly pass a very different judgment; they would probably be as exclusively disposed to praise, as the most disdainful tourists have been to blame. And the farmers and mechanics count for something in the numbers of the English population and in the elements of the British prosperity. Suppose an Ohio or Illinois farmer, after having sold his flour and salt pork to advantage, should enact the nabob six months in England, and on his return should describe, with the rude eloquence of the West, the distress of the British operatives, the corn laws, the poor rates, the frightful condition of the Irish peasantry, the impressment of sailors, the sale of military offices, and to complete his picture of manners, should add a boxing match, a scene of the guests at a dinner rolling dead-drunk under the table, and of the sale of a wife by her husband in open market; if he should give such a picture to his countrymen as a political and moral portrait of England, the English would shrug their shoulders, and with reason. Yet his story would be founded on facts, and could not be said to be actually false in any particular. Now such a story would be an exact counterpart of most of the representations of America by English travellers. Do not to others what you would not have others do to you.

There is one thing in the United States that strikes a stranger on stepping ashore, and is of a character to silence his sentiments of national pride, particularly if he is an Englishman; it is the appearance of general ease in the condition of the people of this country. While European communities are more or less cankered with the sore of pauperism, for which their ablest statesmen have as yet been able to find no healing balm, there are here no paupers, at least not in the Northern and Western States, which have protected themselves from the leprosy of slavery. If a few individuals are seen, they are only an imperceptible minority of dissolute or improvident persons, commonly people of colour, or some newly landed emigrants, who have not been able to adopt industrious habits. Nothing is more easy than to live and to live well by labour. Objects of the first necessity, bread, meat, sugar, tea, coffee, fuel, are in general cheaper here than in France, and wages are double or triple. I happened, a few days ago, to be on the line of a railroad in process of construction, where they were throwing up some embankments. This sort of labour, which merely requires force, without skill, is commonly done in the United States by Irish new-comers, who have no resource but their arm, no quality but muscular strength. These Irish labourers are fed and lodged, and hear their bill of fare; three meals a day, and at each meal plenty of meat and wheat bread; coffee and sugar at two meals, and butter[R] once a day; in the course of the day, from six to eight glasses of whiskey are given them according to the state of the weather. Beside which they receive in money 40 cents a day under the most unfavourable circumstances, often from 60 to 75 cents. In France the same labour is worth about 24 cents a day the labourers finding themselves.

This positive and undeniable fact of the general ease, is connected with another, which gives it a singular importance in the eyes of a European, who is the friend of progressive reforms, and the enemy of violence; the prevalence of radicalism in politics. The term democrat, which elsewhere would fill even the republicans with terror, is here greeted with acclamations, and the name of Democratic is zealously claimed by every party as its exclusive property. But this is the only kind of property which is called in question; it is true that material property rapidly disappears in this country, unless it is preserved by the most constant vigilance, and renewed with untiring industry. But as long as it exists, it is the object of profound respect, which, I must confess, has rather surprised me. I should have expected that the social theory would have borrowed some notions from the predominant political theory; but there are those in Europe, who are not there considered the boldest speculators on this subject, who here would be looked upon as the most audacious innovators. From this simple statement, it seems natural to infer, that valuable lessons are to be learned here by those who seek to solve the great question that now agitates Europe, the amelioration of the greatest number. It would be interesting to inquire into the causes of this state of things, and to examine whether, with certain modifications, it could not be transferred to Europe, and particularly to France.

FOOTNOTES:

[Q] Austriæ est imperare orbi universo; the empire of the world belongs to Austria.

[R] Butter is dearer in the United States than in France.

[LETTER X.]

THE YANKEE AND THE VIRGINIAN.

Charleston, May 28, 1834.

The great flood of civilisation, which has poured over the vast regions of the West, in the south and the north, from the great lakes to the Cape of Florida, has flowed on with a wonderful power and an admirable regularity. Emigration has taken place, along the whole line of march, from east to west. The inhabitants of New England,[S] after having first spread themselves over their original territory, and founded the States of Maine and Vermont, have thrown themselves into the State of New York; thence, keeping as much as possible along the northern frontier of the United States, they have extended all along the coasts of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and overrun the vast delta comprised between the Ohio and the Upper Mississippi, which now contains the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan. The New York and Pennsylvania emigrants have spread themselves comparatively little beyond the limits of their own territory, which are very extensive, and were thinly peopled in 1783. They have, however, furnished a small contingent to the great army of emigration from New England, and have helped to occupy the vast tract above-mentioned. Virginia, after having settled her western part with her own sons, has given birth to Kentucky, and then, acting the same part in the south as New England in the north, has sent forth to the Gulf of Mexico those numerous swarms that have invaded the southwest. North Carolina has taken part in this task, and has beside a child of her own in Tennessee. Georgia and South Carolina have contributed to create Alabama and Mississippi, and Tennessee and Kentucky have in turn furnished offsets for Missouri and Arkansas.

Thus the States in which there are no slaves, have brought forth a family of truly democratic republics, that is to say, with an essentially farming population, holding no slaves, and, excepting the vine, cultivating all the productions of temperate Europe. These young States are founded on equality and the subdivision of property, for most of the farms do not exceed 80 to 160 acres. The Southern States, on the other hand, have created aristocratical republics, based on slavery and the accumulation of property in a few hands, still more exclusively agricultural than the north-western States, and chiefly occupied in cultivating cotton, a precious commodity, which now furnishes for exportation, inclusive of what is consumed in the North, an annual value of 40 or 50 million dollars.[T] Thus amongst all the columns of emigration, two particularly attract attention, and form of themselves the main body of the army, the others are only auxiliaries; these two great masses are the New England and the Virginia columns.

That part of Virginia which was most peopled during the war of Independence has a low and nearly level surface, and a sandy, and in general, very poor soil. Along the rivers there are tracts formerly productive, but even these have been exhausted by the cultivation of tobacco. The proprietors of these estates must have been early led to think of quitting their plantations for the fertile lands of Kentucky, then occupied, or rather overrun, by warlike savages, of whom they were the favourite hunting-ground. Some bold and hardy pioneers, at the head of whom was Boon, first ventured across the mountains with their rifles, and bravely sustained a bloody contest with the Indians. After many desperate fights, in which more than one unknown hero fell under the bullet or the tomahawk of some red-skinned Hector, after numerous assaults, in which more than one matron enacted the part of our Jeanne Hachette,[U] after many alarms and much suffering, the genius of civilisation carried it. At the call of the pioneers, roused by the fame of their exploits, the planters of the coast set out on their pilgrimage; arriving with their slaves, they cleared and cultivated large tracts, in the midst of which they led a patriarchal life, surrounded by their servants and flocks, following with ardour the chase of wild beasts, and sometimes of Indians, and too often spending the proceeds of their crop in betting on the speed of their horses, of which they are very proud, and whose pedigree is better known to them than their own. More lately, when the demand for cotton had increased, in consequence of the improvements in machinery, and the steamboat had opened the way into the heart of the Mississippi Valley, they have removed southwards, always taking their slaves with them; a prospect of future wealth and prosperity was thus opened for the south.

The industrious sons of New England likewise bade farewell to the rocky and ungrateful soil of their birthplace; loading a wagon with a plough, a bed, a barrel of salt meat, the indispensable supply of tea and molasses, a Bible and a wife, and with his axe on his shoulder, the Yankee sets out for the West, without a servant, without an assistant, often without a companion, to build himself a log hut, six hundred miles from his father's roof, and clear away a spot for a farm in the midst of the boundless forest. The first of these wanderers went from Connecticut, the land of steady habits, of Puritans among Puritans.

The Virginian and the Yankee have planted themselves in the wilderness, each in a manner conformable to his nature and condition. The part they have taken in founding the new States of the West, explains the fact so often mentioned of fifty or sixty members of Congress being natives of Virginia or Connecticut. In this conquest over nature, Europe has not remained an idle spectator; she has sent forth vigourous labourers, who have co-operated with the sons of New England, for slavery drives them from the men of the South. Many Irish and Scotch, a number of Germans, Swiss, and some French, are now settled in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The traveller who descends the Ohio, passes on the way Gallipolis, a French settlement, Vevay, a Swiss village, and Marietta, so called in honour of Marie Antoinette.[V] The terminations in burg are scattered amongst Indian names, Jacksonvilles, Washingtons, and Columbias. But the co-operation of Europeans does not deprive the Yankees of the principal share in the honour of the work; they began it, they have borne and still bear the burden and heat of the day. In comparison with them, the European has been only the eleventh-hour-man, the apprentice, the hireling. The fusion of the European with the Yankee takes place but slowly, even on the new soil of the West; for the Yankee is not a man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam's oldest son was a Yankee. Enough, however, of foreign blood has been mingled with the Yankee blood to modify the primitive character of the New England race, and to form a third American type, that of the West, whose features are not yet sharply defined, but are daily assuming more distinctness; this type is characterised by its athletic forms and ambitious pretensions, and seems destined ultimately to become superior to the others.

The Yankee and the Virginian are very unlike each other; they have no great love for each other, and are often at variance. They are the same men who cut each other's throats in England, under the name of Roundheads and Cavaliers. In England, they patched up a peace by the interposition of a third dynasty, which was neither Stuart nor Cromwell. In America, where there was no power to mediate between them, they would have devoured each other as they did in England, had not Providence thrown them wide apart, one party at the south, the other at the north, leaving between them the territory now occupied by the justes-milieux States of New York and Pennsylvania, with their satellites, New Jersey and Delaware.

The Virginian of pure race is frank, hearty, open, cordial in his manners, noble in his sentiments, elevated in his notions, he is a worthy descendant of the English gentleman. Surrounded, from infancy, by his slaves, who relieve him from all personal exertion, he is rather indisposed to activity, and is even indolent. He is generous and profuse; around him, but rather in the new States than in impoverished Virginia, abundance reigns. When the cotton crop has been good and the price is high, he invites everybody, excepting only the slaves that cultivate his fields, to partake in his wealth, without much thought of next year's produce. To him, the practice of hospitality is at once a duty, a pleasure, and a happiness. Like the Eastern patriarchs or Homer's heroes, he spits an ox to regale the guest whom Providence sends him and an old friend recommends to his attention, and to moisten this solid repast, he offers Madeira, of which he is as proud as of his horses, which has been twice to the East Indies, and has been ripening full twenty years. He loves the institutions of his country, yet he shows with pride his family plate, the arms on which, half effaced by time, attest his descent from the first colonists, and prove that his ancestors were of a good family in England. When his mind has been cultivated by study, and a tour in Europe has polished his manners and refined his imagination, there is no place in the world in which he would not appear to advantage, no destiny too high for him to reach; he is one of those, whom a man is glad to have as a companion, and desires as a friend. Ardent and warm-hearted, he is of the block from which great orators are made. He is better able to command men, than to conquer nature and subdue the soil. When he has a certain degree of the spirit of method, and, I will not say of will, (for he has enough of that), but of that active perseverance so common among his brethren of the North, he has all the qualities needful to form a great statesman.

The Yankee, on the contrary, is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him, and yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. His imagination is active and original, producing, however, not poetry, but drollery. The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober, frugal, and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the West, he continues moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. In New England he has a large share of prudence, but once thrown into the midst of the treasures of the West, he becomes a speculator, a gambler even, although he has a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of hazard and even of skill, except the innocent game at bowls. He is crafty, sly, always calculating, boasting even of the tricks which he plays upon the careless or trusting buyer, because he looks upon them as marks of his superior sagacity, and well provided with mental reservations to lull his conscience. With all his nice subtleties, he is, nevertheless, expeditious in business, because he knows the value of time. His house is a sanctuary, which he does not open to the profane; he is little given to hospitality, or rather he displays it only on rare occasions, and then he does so on a great scale. He is a ready speaker, and a close reasoner, but not a brilliant orator. For a statesman, he wants that greatness of mind and soul which enables a man to enter into and love another's nature, and leads him naturally to consult his neighbour's good, in consulting his own. He is individualism incarnate; in him the spirit of locality and division is carried to the utmost.[W] But if he is not a great statesman, he is an able administrator, an unrivalled man of business. If he is not suited to command men, he has no equal in acting upon things, in combining, arranging, and giving them a value. There are nowhere merchants of more consummate ability than those of Boston.

But it is particularly as the colonist of the wilderness, that the Yankee is admirable; fatigue has no hold on him. He has not, like the Spaniard, the capacity to bear hunger and thirst, but he has the much superior faculty of finding, at all times and in all places, something to eat and to drink, and of being always able to contrive a shelter from the cold, first for his wife and children, and afterward for himself. He grapples with nature in close fight, and more unyielding than she, subdues her at last, obliging her to surrender at discretion, to yield whatever he wills, and to take the shape he chooses. Like Hercules, he conquers the hydra of the pestilential morass, and chains the rivers; more daring than Hercules, he extends his dominion not only over the land, but over the sea; he is the best sailor in the world, the ocean is his tributary, and enriches him with the oil of her whales and with all her lesser fry. More wise than the hero of the twelve labours, he knows no Omphale that is able to seduce, no Dejanira, whose poisoned gifts can balk his searching glance. In this respect he is rather a Ulysses, who has his Penelope, counts upon her faith, and remains steadfastly true to her. He does not even need to stop his ears, when he passes near the Sirens, for in him the tenderest passions are deadened by religious austerity and devotion to his business. Like Ulysses in another point, he has a bag full of shifts; overtaken at night by a storm in the woods, in a half hour, with no other resource than his knife, he will have made a shelter for himself and his horse. In winter, caught in one of those snow-storms, which are unknown among us, he will construct a sled in the twinkling of an eye, and keep on his way, like an Indian, by watching the bark of the trees. Thus to the genius of business, by means of which he turns to profit whatever the earth yields him, he joins the genius of industry, which makes her prolific, and that of mechanical skill, which fashions her produce to his wants. He is incomparable as a pioneer, unequalled as a settler of the wilderness.

The Yankee has set his mark on the United States during the last half century. He has been eclipsed by Virginia in the counsels of the nation;[X] but he has in turn had the upper hand throughout the country, and eclipsed her on her own soil; for in order to arouse the Virginian from his southern indolence, it has been necessary that the Yankee should come to set him an example of activity and enterprise at his own door. But for the Yankee, the vast cotton plantations of the South would still be an uncultivated waste. It was a Yankee, Ely Whitney, who, toward the end of the last century, invented the cotton-gin, which has made the fortune of the South. To give a speculation success in the South, some Yankee must have come a thousand miles to suggest the idea to the natives, and carry off the profit before their eyes. New England has given only two Presidents to the Union, both popular on the eve of their election, both unpopular on the morrow, both rejected at the end of their first term, while all the others have been natives of Virginia or South Carolina, and have been rechosen for a second term. But then what a revenge has she taken in business matters, at the North and the South, in the East as well as the West! Here the Yankee is a true Marquis of Carabas. At Baltimore as well as at Boston, in New Orleans as well as at Salem, in New York as well as at Portland, if a merchant is mentioned who has made and kept a large fortune by sagacity and forecast, you will find that he is a Yankee. If you pass a plantation in the South in better order than the others, with finer avenues, with the negroes' cabins better arranged and more comfortable, you will be told, "Oh! that is a Yankee's; he is a smart man!" In a village in Missouri, by the side of a house with broken windows, dirty in its outward appearance, around the door of which a parcel of ragged children are quarrelling and fighting, you may see another, freshly painted, surrounded by a simple, but neat and nicely white-washed fence, with a dozen of carefully trimmed trees about it, and through the windows in a small room shining with cleanliness, you may espy some nicely combed little boys, and some young girls dressed in almost the last Paris fashion. Both houses belong to farmers, but one of them is from North Carolina, and the other from New England. On the western rivers, you will hear a boat mentioned which never meets with an accident, and in which all travellers and merchants are eager to take their passage; the master is a Yankee. Along side of the levée at New Orleans, you may be struck with the fine appearance of a ship, which all the passers-by stop to admire; the master is also a Yankee.

The preëminence of the Yankee in the colonisation of the country, has made him the arbiter of manners and customs. It is from him that the country has taken a general hue of austere severity, that is religious and even bigoted; it is through him that all sorts of amusements, which among us are considered as innocent relaxations, are here proscribed as immoral pleasures. It is he that has introduced the Prison Reform, multiplied schools, founded Temperance Societies (See Note 13). It is through his agency, with his money, that the Missionaries are endeavouring silently to found colonies in the South Seas, for the benefit of the Union. If we wished to form a single type, representing the American character of the present moment as a single whole, it would be necessary to take at least three-fourths of the Yankee race, and to mix with it hardly one fourth of the Virginian. The physical labour of colonisation is now nearly brought to an end; the physical basis of society is laid. On this base it becomes necessary to raise a social structure of yet unknown form, but which, I am fully convinced, will be on a new plan, for all the materials are new; and besides, neither humanity nor Providence ever repeats itself. Which of the two races is best suited to execute this new task? I cannot tell; but it seems to me that the Virginian is now about to take his turn, and that in the phase which the United States are now on the point of entering, the social qualities of the Virginian will obtain the superiority, that naturally belonged to the laborious Yankee in the period of settling the forest. In a word, I believe, that, if the Union lasts, and the West continues to form a united mass from the falls of Niagara to New Orleans, this third type of the west, which is now forming and already aspires to rule over the others, will take a great deal from the Virginian and very little from the Yankee.

It is no small advantage to a people to combine within itself two types with different characteristics, when they unite harmoniously in composing a common national character. A people of which all the individual members are referrible to a single type, is among nations what an unmarried man is among individuals; it is a sort of hermit, its life is monotonous; the strongest and sweetest feelings of human nature are dormant in it; it continues stationary; there is nothing to spur it forward. Such was ancient Egypt. A people consisting of two types, on the contrary, when neither has an oppressive superiority over the other, enjoys a complete existence; its life is a perpetual interchange of ideas and sensations, like that of a married pair. It has the power of reproducing and regenerating itself. Each of the two natures alternately acts and reposes itself, without ever being inactive. By turns each gains the superiority and yields to the other; and thus according to circumstances, different qualities come into play. The two natures mutually support and relieve each other, they stimulate each other, and through this wholesome rivalry, the nation that combines them in itself, reaches high destinies.

History shows that the progress of humanity has been constantly promoted by the reciprocal action and reaction of two natures, or two races, sometimes friends, oftener enemies or rivals. The most general fact in the history of our civilisation is the struggle between the East and the West, from the expedition of the Argonauts and the war of Troy, to the battle of Lepanto and the siege of Vienna by the Turks. In this great drama, it was not merely to shed rivers of blood, that Providence has dashed against each other Europeans and Asiatics, Greeks and Persians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Parthians, Saracens and Franks, Venitians, Turks, and Poles; blows have not been the only thing exchanged between Europe and the Orient. If you wish to know what the West has gained from contact with the East, even when they met sword in hand, look around you; most of the fruit trees that enrich your fields, the vine which gladdens the heart, the silk and cotton that adorn your houses and your persons, these are the spoils of your Eastern wars; sugar and coffee, the cultivation of which has changed the political balance of the world, were brought into Europe from the East, the one by yourselves, the other by the Arabs, when they made themselves masters of Spain. The mariner's compass, which has given a new continent to civilisation, and established the dominion of man over the before unconquered deep, was the gift of the East. Your arts and your sciences are of Oriental origin; the secrets of Algebra were stolen from the Moors of Spain by a monk; your system of numeration, the basis of all your financial improvements, bears the name of the Arabs; your chivalry was brought from Asia by the Crusaders. Christianity, the mother of modern Europe, would not have existed in the West, had not the Roman legions conquered Judea which contained its germ, had not the Roman empire contained the school of Alexandria in which that germ could put forth, and had not the Rome of the Cæsars been raised as a pedestal for the successors of St. Peter, from which they might rule over the East and the West.

Behold the Roman people; its noble career was a continual succession of wars, followed by as many incorporations of the conquered, alliances, real marriages, which; always give it a new vigour. It begins with the double figure of Romulus and Remus; then follow the Romans and Sabines, then Rome and Alba, next Rome and the Latins, and next Rome and Carthage. It might be called a young sultan, who carries off a captive at the point of the sword, and makes her his favourite until he grows tired of her, or until he finds another more worthy of his love. It goes on in this way, changing, and daily rising in the successive subjects of its choice, until it meets with Greece, which becomes not an object of a passing caprice, but a favorite sultana. This Union of the Greek and Roman natures gave its splendour to imperial Rome, and rest to the world. Its destiny once entwined with that of Greece, the Roman people paused to enjoy; and with this purpose, substituted the rule of the Cæsars for the republican constitution, and Greek rhetoricians and players, and emperors, voluptuous like the disciples of Epicurus, or philosophers, like Pericles, for the stern and severe aristocracy of earlier days. What is the history of Greece, but a continual oscillation between the austere Lacedæmon and the brilliant Athens, between the country of Lycurgus and Leonidas, and that of Solon, Aspasia, and Alcibiades. United, they acquired an indomitable energy, and supported the shock of all Asia. Unfortunately they had too little feeling of a common nationality, and too much of local jealousy; almost perpetually divided, they never completely extended their sway over Greece itself, and when the Greek race was about to reach its zenith, neither was destined to lead it thither, but Providence raised up a man in the North, before whom the earth was silent.

Whilst a nation comprises an indefinite number of types mixed together without order and without rank, it resembles a body not yet in a state of consistency; it has no definable character, no fixed destination; it is incapable of achieving any thing great. Thus from the time of the war of the old German electors against the Holy Empire, and of the treaty of Westphalia, which sanctioned their independence and broke in pieces the former unity of the nation, Germany continued under an eclipse, until the period of the rise of the house of Brandenburg from the midst of the anarchy of the little German States, when a rival was given to the house of Austria and a strong dualism established. Dualism is not, however, the only mode in which a society can be constituted, at once solid and elastic. When a third type, whose superiority is admitted by the others, or which partakes sufficiently of the nature of each to serve as a bond and a mediator between them, exists, the social organisation is then in a high degree vigourous; for then, the harmony between the two primitive types has ceased to be an abstraction, it has become a substance. In some cases this third personage of the drama becomes so indispensable to the action, that it must be supplied at any rate, and its great prerogatives devolve on a transient actor; thus in Greece, Thebes played this part during a short period. Sometimes it has been filled by an aristocracy, which has served as a check to both parties in turn; an aristocracy worthy of the name is eminently qualified for this task, because it combines the two natures in itself, feels the reaction of their passions influencing itself, and has the energy necessary either to curb or spur them on, as the exigency of the case requires. There is no country in which dualism is more admirably developed than in the United States; each of the two natures has an open field, each a distinct career of industry; each possesses in the highest degree the qualities necessary for its peculiar position. Considered in respect to a triple type, the United States are not less favorably situated; the young giant that is growing up in the West, seems destined to fulfil the prophecy the last shall be first, and bind together the North and the South in his vigourous gripe.

In France we have two distinct types, that of the North and that of the South; but instead of employing the principle of centralisation as a means of developing the nature of both, and giving them a free and harmonious action, we have endeavoured to confound them in a narrow and sterile unity. We have especially thwarted the most reasonable and legitimate wishes of the South, which has been overborne and crushed by the North. It takes its revenge, indeed, in furnishing us with most of our statesmen, very much as Ireland has the privilege of giving premiers to England; but like Irish ministers in England, our Southern statesmen, ungrateful sons of a neglected mother, govern wholly in the interest of the North, as if France contained towns only, and had no rural population, as if we were chiefly a manufacturing, and but partially an agricultural people, and, what is worse, as if we were a school of philosophers, and not a nation longing for religious faith and political love.

FOOTNOTES:

[S] The name of Yankee was first applied in derision, but the New Englanders, thinking that they have ennobled it, have adopted it.

[T] Exports of cotton from the United States. (Doc. 146, Ho. of Reps. Sess. 24 Cong.)

The domestic consumption at present amounts to about 250,000 bales, or about 100 million pounds, of the value of about ten millions. The crop of 1835 was 1,350,000 bales or about 500 million pounds, of the value of 60 millions. The yearly value of the wine made in France is about twice that sum, but the value of the export does not exceed thirteen and a half million dollars.

[U] [This French heroine distinguished herself at the siege of Beauvais, in 1472, when she snatched a standard from the hands of the assailants. Her real name seems to have been Fourquet, that of Hachette (Hatchet) having been probably assumed or given to her, like those of Wat Tyler and Jack Carter, of English history.—Trans.]

[V] [If the author means to imply that it was so called by French settlers he is in error, as it is well known to have been founded and named by the first New England colony in Ohio. Neither is he correct, if, as seems to be the case, he supposes all the burgs to be German towns.—Trans.]

[W] In Massachusetts, with a population of 610,000 souls, the House of Representatives consists of about 600 members; the most petty village must have its Representative.

[X] At this time, for instance, ten Senators out of 48 are natives of Virginia. Of seven presidents four have been from Virginia. Many of the members of Congress are natives of New England, and particularly of Connecticut, but they are generally laborious, second-rate men, rather than men of influence and superior abilities.

[LETTER XI.]

LOWELL.

Lowell, June 12, 1834.

The municipal elections which took place in New York two months ago, and the legislative elections in Virginia, which occupied the whole month of April, have revealed to the Opposition its whole strength. Their success was unexpected, particularly in New York; I say success, although the newly elected mayor belongs to the administration party, because the Opposition has the majority in both houses of the common council, the board of aldermen, and the board of assistants, who govern in reality. Since that time, the Opposition has continued to gain ground. There are some able statesmen in the Senate, who are also skilful parliamentary tacticians; they knew that by irritating the President they might force him to commit some act of imprudence, and this motive was not without its weight in the adoption by the Senate of resolutions censuring his conduct in regard to the Bank. The old General felt this censure very sensibly, and replied to it by a protest, which his best friends consider a mistake, and which the Senate refused to have entered on its journal. It is a matter of surprise that Mr Van Buren, whose sagacity all admit, did not interpose his influence to prevent the sending of this message. One of the fundamental maxims of American politics is, that the sword and purse should not be united in the same hands; that is, that the President, to whom the constitution has entrusted the military force of the Republic, should not also be the keeper of the public money. This is here a universally received, undisputed maxim; and the President's protest clashes with this doctrine. It became necessary, therefore, to follow up the protest by an explanatory message, which the Opposition calls a recantation, and which in truth is one. This retractation or explanation has not, however, destroyed the effect of the first message, and the consequence has been a hesitation in the democratic ranks. The Virginia elections, which were then going on, show that they were influenced by it, and some other elections of less importance have turned out unfavorably to the Administration.

In Albany, the head-quarters of Mr Van Buren's friends, the Opposition has carried the municipal elections. The partisans of the Administration have, as if in sport, added fault to fault. A committee of the House of Representatives, appointed to examine into the doings of the Bank, of which the majority were Jackson men, as the administration has the upper hand in that body, committed a series of blunders: there was a paper war between the committee and the directors of the Bank, in which the former were completely unhorsed, and had no better resource than the brutal idea of ordering the President and directors to be taken into custody by the sergeant-at-arms. Such a proposition was revolting to every body; the majority lately so compact, already exhibits symptoms of disaffection, and several recent votes show that the Opposition is gaining ground. One might say that the prudent, those, to use the words of the great master of diplomacy, whose watches go faster than those of their neighbours, are getting ready to desert. Out of the legislative houses, the Opposition is organising energetically for the general elections, which are to take place next autumn; it is making preparations in the spirit with which they are made, when one feels sure of victory, and is determined that it shall be a decisive one. In New York, for example, the common council have removed all the Jackson men from municipal offices; all have made way for the opponents of the Administration. The mayor will have an Anti-Jackson secretary, because that officer is chosen by the common council. These removals are harsh measures, but the friends of the Administration have no right to complain, for they have set the example on a larger scale, by removing hundreds of custom-house officers and postmasters. Without pretending to justify these violent acts, it should be considered that something more is involved than merely the removing of an adversary to make way for a friend. The Opposition wish that the inspectors of streets should be Anti-Jackson men, because the scavengers, who are in their employ, have a vote; just as the Administration insists upon all the postmasters being Jackson men, because in the country they have a certain influence.

It is less than a year since General Jackson visited the great towns of the North. He was received with acclamations such as neither America had ever before witnessed. Washington never excited half the enthusiasm; neither Bolivar, Pizarro, nor the great Cortez was ever saluted with such pompous epithets. It was an apotheosis. It is not yet a year since, and already abuse has succeeded to the most extravagant praise. A few days ago, I was grieved to read some unbecoming pleasantries upon the old General's scars. What will be held sacred, if honourable wounds, all received in front, fighting for one's country, are to become a subject of low jests? The war of the President on the Bank was certainly unjust and disastrous to the country; the measures taken in his name against that institution, were impolitic and unauthorised by law; the violent passion and imperious temper displayed by him in the affair, make a strange figure in the seat, that had been occupied by sages like Washington and his successors. All this is true; but when we look back on fifty years of public services, we are filled with grief and indignation to think, that at the end of so long a career, outrage and ingratitude will be, perhaps, his only reward. Can he have been raised so high, only that his fall should be greater? Is he destined to furnish another proof of the instability of popular favour in every age and all countries? But instead of dwelling on these unpleasant reflections, I will rather describe the scene now exhibited literally under my windows.

The town of Lowell dates its origin eleven years ago, and it now contains 15,000 inhabitants, inclusive of the suburb of Belvedere. Twelve years ago it was a barren waste, in which the silence was interrupted only by the murmur of the little river of Concord, and the noisy dashings of the clear waters of the Merrimac, against the granite blocks that suddenly obstruct their course. At present, it is a pile of huge factories, each five, six, or seven stories high, and capped with a little white belfry, which strongly contrasts with the red masonry of the building, and is distinctly projected on the dark hills in the horizon. By the side of these larger structures rise numerous little wooden houses, painted white, with green blinds, very neat, very snug, very nicely carpeted, and with a few small trees around them, or brick houses in the English style, that is to say, simple, but tasteful without and comfortable within; on one side, fancy-goods shops and milliners' rooms without number, for the women[Y] are the majority in Lowell, and vast hotels in the American style, very much like barracks (the only barracks in Lowell); on another, canals, water-wheels, waterfalls, bridges, banks, schools, and libraries, for in Lowell reading is the only recreation,[Z] and there are no less than seven journals printed here. All around are churches and meeting-houses of every sect, Episcopalian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, Universalist, Unitarian, &c., and there is also a Roman Catholic chapel. Here are all the edifices of a flourishing town in the Old World, except the prisons, hospitals, and theatres; everywhere is heard the noise of hammers, of spindles, of bells calling the hands to their work, or dismissing them from their tasks, of coaches and six arriving or starting off, of the blowing of rocks to make a mill-race or to level a road; it is the peaceful hum of an industrious population, whose movements are regulated like clockwork; a population not native to the town, and one half of which at least will die elsewhere, after having aided in founding three or four other towns; for the full-blooded American has this in common with the Tartar, that he is encamped, not established, on the soil he treads upon.

Massachusetts and the adjoining small States of New England contain several manufacturing towns similar to Lowell, but none of them on so large a scale. An American, well acquainted with the character of his countrymen, gave me the following account of the origin of these towns, and of Lowell in particular. "In 1812," said he, "the United States declared war against Great Britain to defend the honour of their insulted flag. Boston and the rest of New England opposed the war, and thus drew upon themselves the reproaches of their brethren of the Middle and Southern States. The fact, is, they were quite as sensitive as the rest of their countrymen to any insult offered their flag by the mistress of the ocean; the patriotism of the New Englanders is above suspicion; they began the war of Independence, and they supported the principal burden of that war. They were, likewise, resolved to have satisfaction for the outrages committed by England, for it was they who had the greater number of seamen impressed by the English;[AA] but they did not wish to have recourse to the cannon's mouth. A commercial people, they had much to lose and nothing to gain by a maritime war; a clear-sighted race, they saw that the chance of war was on the side that could muster the largest armies and the most numerous navy; in a word, war appeared to them to be a barbarous, old-fashioned means, unworthy of their inventive wit. The Yankees never do anything like other people, but they always have some contrivance in store, that nobody else would have ever thought of. After a careful examination, the Yankee said to himself, the best mode of warfare against the English will be to attack the sources of their wealth; now what is the principal source of the wealth of Great Britain? Its manufactures. Among its manufactures which are the most productive? Why the cotton. Well then, we will set up spinning works and manufactories of cottons; this will be our war on Great Britain. Ten or twelve years were passed in making experiments, in preliminary preparations and attempts to form a class of operatives, and to make machinery. In 1823, the Merrimack corporation began operations at Lowell, where the River Merrimack has a fall of 32 feet, creating a vast motive power, and has been followed by the Hamilton, Appleton, Lowell, Suffolk, Tremont, Lawrence, and other companies in succession."

Such is Lowell. Its name is derived from that of a Boston merchant, who was one of the first promoters of the cotton-manufacture in the United States. It is not like one of our European towns that was built by some demi-god, a son of Jupiter, or by some hero of the Trojan war or by the genius of an Alexander or a Cæsar, or by some saint, attracting crowds by his miracles, or by the whim of some great sovereign, like Louis XIV. or Frederic, or by an edict of Peter the Great. It was neither a pious foundation, nor an asylum for fugitives, nor a military post; but it is one of the speculations of the merchants of Boston. The same spirit of enterprise, which a year ago suggested the idea of sending a cargo of ice from Boston to Calcutta round Cape Horn, to cool the drink of Lord William Bentinck and the nabobs of the India company, has led them to build up a town here, wholly at their own expense, with all the buildings required by the wants of a civilised community, in order to be able to manufacture white cottons and calicoes; and they have succeeded, as they always succeed in their speculations. The semi-annual dividends of the manufacturing companies in Lowell, are generally from 5 to 6 per cent.

The cotton manufacture in America, which dates only from the last war with England, is rapidly extending, although the modifications of the tariff, required by the attitude of South Carolina last year, have somewhat tended to check the manufacturing spirit. Boston seems destined, like Liverpool, to have its Lancashire behind it. As water-courses abound in New England, according to the nature of all primary regions, steam-engines may be dispensed with for a long time to come. This part of the country is very unproductive, and it required all the perseverance and obstinacy, even, of the Puritans to introduce into it the comforts of life. It is rugged, rocky, mountainous, and bleak, consisting in fact of the first ridges of the Alleghanies, which extend hence to the Gulf of Mexico, continually receding from the Atlantic as they stretch southwards. The inhabitants have an extraordinary mechanical genius, they are patient, attentive, and inventive, and they must succeed in manufactures; or rather they have already succeeded, and Lowell is a miniature Manchester. About 30,000 bales of cotton, or one sixth of the whole domestic consumption (see Note 14), are consumed in Lowell, besides which there are several manufactories of broadcloths, cassimeres, and carpets. To strengthen the resemblance between their city and Liverpool, the Boston merchants determined to construct a railroad from Boston to Lowell, the length of which is 26 miles; there was already a canal, as there is one between Liverpool and Manchester, but this has been found insufficient, as it was at Liverpool and Manchester. They would not permit this road to be constructed in the usual hasty and provisional manner of the American works, but they determined to have something Roman, and their engineers have given it to them, and have certainly made the most solid railroad in the world. They have only left out the beautiful masonry, the arches of hewn stone, the columns, and all the monumental architecture, which makes the Liverpool and Manchester railroad one of the wonders of modern times; these magnificent ornaments yield no dividends. Yet the Boston and Lowell railroad in its Roman or Cyclopean simplicity, will cost 56,000 dollars a mile.

In travelling through the neighbourhood of Manchester, one is struck with wonder at the sight of the great spinning works; in looking at those huge white buildings by moon-light, projecting themselves on the dark back ground above the plain, those hundreds of windows from which stream the brilliant rays of gas-lights, those lofty chimneys, higher than the highest obelisks, one is tempted to think them palaces, abodes of pleasure and joy. Alas! the delusive splendours! alas! the whited sepulchres! All this fairy illusion vanishes, when one crosses their door-sill, sees the haggard looks and ragged clothes of the crowd that fills these vast structures, beholds those poor children whom Parliament vainly strives to protect against their fathers, who are incessantly begetting new competitors, and against the lash of their overseers. On arriving at Lowell, the first impression of pleasure caused by the sight of the town, new and fresh like an opera scene, fades away before the melancholy reflection, will this become like Lancashire? Does this brilliant glare hide the misery and suffering of operatives, and those degrading vices, engendered by poverty in the manufacturing towns, drunkenness and prostitution, popular sedition hanging over the heads of the rich by a frail thread, which an ordinary accident, and slight imprudence, or a breath of the bad passions, would snap asunder? This question I hasten to answer.

FOOTNOTES:

[Y] The female population of Lowell, between the ages of 15 and 25 years, corresponds to a total population of from 50,000 to 60,000 souls.

[Z] The rigid spirit of Puritanism has been carried to its utmost in Lowell, owing to the great number of young girls collected together in the factories. In 1836, a man was fined by the municipal authorities for exercising the trade of common fiddler; he was treated as if he had outraged the public morals, the magistrates fearing that the pleasures of the dance might tend to corruption of manners.

[AA] New England comprises but one sixth part of the whole population of the Union, but she owns one half of the shipping of the country, or 700,000 tons out of a little more than fourteen hundred thousand.

[LETTER XII.]

THE FACTORY GIRLS OF LOWELL.

Boston, June 22, 1834.

War, the last argument of kings and people, war, in which they put forth their strength with pride, is not, however, the greatest exhibition of human power. A field of battle may excite terror or a feverish enthusiasm, pity or horror; but human strength applied to create is more imposing, than human strength employed in slaughter and destruction. The pyramids or the colossal temples of Thebes, the Coliseum or Saint Peter's of Rome, reveal a higher grandeur than a field of battle covered with desolation and death, were it strown with three hundred thousand bodies, as in those two great fights in which our fathers, under Meroveus and Charles Martel, presented a barrier to the career of the barbarians, and saved the Western world from the encroachments of the East. The power of man, like that of God, is not less visible in small things than in great. There is nothing in the physical order of things of which our race has a better right to boast, than of the mechanical inventions, by means of which man holds in check the irregular vigour, or brings forth the hidden energies, of nature. By the aid of mechanical contrivances, this poor weak creature, reaching out his hands over the immensity of nature, takes possession of the rivers, of the winds of heaven, of the tides of the ocean. By them, he drags forth from the secret bowels of the earth their hidden stores of fuel and of metals, and masters the subterranean waters, which there dispute his dominion. By them, he turns each drop of water into a reservoir of steam,[AB] that is, into a magazine of power, and thus he changes the globe, in comparison with which he seems an atom, into a laborious, untiring, submissive slave, performing the heaviest tasks under the eye of its master. Is there any thing which gives a higher idea of the power of man, than the steam-engine under the form in which it is applied to produce motion on railroads? It is more than a machine, it is almost a living being; it moves, it runs like a courser at the top of his speed; more than this, it breathes; the steam which issues at regular periods from the pipes, and is condensed into a white cloud, resembles the quick breathing of a racehorse. A steam-engine has a complete respiratory apparatus, which acts like our own by expansion and compression; it wants only a system of circulation to live.

One evening, while in Virginia, I was looking at a distant locomotive engine, approaching along the Petersburg and Roanoke railroad, one of the fine works of which Mr Robinson, the engineer, yet a young man, has executed so many in Virginia and Pennsylvania. The engine came on at its usual rate of speed, through a narrow clearing cut for the road in one of the primitive forests, formerly the domain of the great king Powhatan and his copper-coloured warriors.[AC] The chimney threw out thousands of sparks from its wide, funnel-shaped top; although yet at a distance, the noise of the quick breathing of the pipes was distinctly heard. In the darkness, in so wild a place, in the bosom of a vast wilderness and the midst of a profound silence, it was necessary either to be acquainted with mechanics, or to be imbued with the incredulity of the age, not to believe this flying, panting, flaming machine, a winged dragon vomiting forth fire. A short time since some Brahmins, the fathers of ancient science, seeing a steamboat stem the current of the sacred Ganges, really believed that it was some strange animal, recently discovered by the English in some distant region.

In our modern societies the improvements of machinery have given us manufactures, which promise to be a source of inexhaustible prosperity and well-being to mankind.

The English manufactories alone yield about eight hundred million yards of cotton stuffs annually, or about one yard for each inhabitant of the globe. If it were required to produce this amount of cloth without machinery, by, the fingers alone, it is probable that each of us would hardly be able to card, spin, and weave his yard a year, so that the whole time of the whole human race would be occupied by a task, which, by the aid of machinery, is accomplished by five hundred thousand arms in Great Britain. From this fact we may conclude, that when the manufacturing system shall be well regulated and completely organised, a moderate amount of labour by a small part of the human race, will be sufficient to produce all the physical comforts for the whole. There can be no doubt, that it will be so, some day or another; but this beautiful order of things is yet remote. The manufacturing system is a novelty, it is expanding and maturing itself, (see Note 15), and as it ripens, it certainly will improve; the staunchest pessimists cannot deny this, yet we should expose ourselves to the most cruel disappointments, if we imagined that the progress of improvement can be otherwise than slow, step by step. There are seven-leagued boots in fairy-tales, but none in history. Meanwhile the manufacturing system temporarily involves the most disastrous consequences, which it would be useless to enumerate here. Who has not sounded its depths with terror? Who has not wept over it? It is the canker of England, a canker so inveterate, that one is sometimes tempted to think, that all the ability displayed of late years by the British statesmen in attempts at domestic reform, will prove a dead loss.

The introduction of the manufacturing system into a new country, under the empire of very different circumstances, is an event worthy of the closest attention. No sooner was I recovered from the sort of giddiness with which I was seized at the sight of this extemporaneous town, hardly had I taken time to touch it, to make sure that it was not a pasteboard town, like those which Potemkin erected for Catherine along the road to Byzantium, when I set myself to inquire, how far the creation of manufactures in this country, had given rise to the same dangers in regard to the welfare and morals of the working class, and in regard to the security of the rich and of public order, as in Europe; and through the polite attention of the agents of the two principal companies (the Merrimack and the Lawrence), I was able to satisfy my curiosity. The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell; of this number nearly five thousand are young women from 17 to 24 years of age, the daughters of farmers from the different New England States, and particularly from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont; they are here remote from their families, and under their own control. On seeing them pass through the streets in the morning and evening and at their meal-hours, neatly dressed; on finding their scarfs, and shawls, and green silk hoods which they wear as a shelter from the sun and dust (for Lowell is not yet paved), hanging up in the factories amidst the flowers and shrubs, which they cultivate, I said to myself, this, then, is not like Manchester; and when I was informed of the rate of their wages, I understood that it was not at all like Manchester. The following are the average weekly wages paid by the Merrimack corporation last May.

These numbers are averages; the wages of the more skilful hands amounting to five, and sometimes nearly six dollars. Note that last March, in consequence of the crisis occasioned by the President's quarrel with the Bank, there was a general reduction of from 30 to 40 cents a week. You know how much smaller are the wages of women than of men;[AD] there are few women in Europe, out of a few great cities, who can earn more than 20 cents a day or one dollar a week. It must also be remembered, that, in the United States the necessaries of life are not only much cheaper than in England, but even than in France, so that a great many of these girls can save a dollar or a dollar and a half a week. After spending four years in the factories, they may have a little fortune of 250 or 300 dollars, when they often quit work and marry.[AE]

In France, it would be difficult to conceive of a state of things, in which young girls, generally pretty, should be separated from their families, and thrown together, at a distance of 50 or 100 miles from home, in a town in which their parents could have no person to advise and watch over them. It is a fact, however, with the exception of a very small number of cases, which only prove the rule, that this state of things has yet had no bad effects in Lowell. The manners of the English race are totally different from those of us French; all their habits and all their notions wholly unlike ours. The Protestant education, much more than our Catholic discipline, draws round each individual a line over which it is difficult to step. The consequence is more coldness in the domestic relations, a more or less complete absence of a full and free expression of the stronger feelings of the soul, but, in turn, every one is obliged and accustomed to show more respect for the feelings of others. What amongst us would pass for a youthful imprudence or a pretty trick, is severely frowned upon by the English and Americans, and particularly by the Americans of New England, who are, as has been said, double-distilled English. Nobody in this country, then, is surprised to see the daughters of rural proprietors, after having received a tolerable education, quit their native village and their parents, take up their residence 50 or 100 miles off, in a town where they have no acquaintance, and pass two or three years in this state of isolation and independence; they are under the safeguard of the public faith. All this presupposes an extreme reserve of manners, a vigilant, inexorable, and rigid public opinion, and it must be acknowledged, that, under this rigourous system, there is a sombre hue, an air of listlessness, thrown over society; but, when one reflects on the dangers to which the opposite system exposes the daughters of the poor, who have no guardian to warn and protect them, when one counts its victims, however slight may be his sympathies with the people, it is difficult to deny, that the Anglo-American prudery, all things considered, is fully worth our ease and freedom of manners, whatever may be their attractions.[AF]

The manufacturing companies exercise the most careful supervision over these girls. I have already said, that, twelve years ago, Lowell did not exist; when, therefore, the manufactories were set up, it also became necessary to provide lodgings for the operatives, and each company has built for this purpose a number of houses within its own limits, to be used exclusively as boarding-houses for them. Here they are under the care of the mistress of the house, who is paid by the company at the rate of one dollar and a quarter a week for each boarder, that sum being stopped out of the weekly wages of the girls. These housekeepers, who are generally widows, are each responsible for the conduct of her boarders, and they are themselves subject to the control and supervision of the company, in the management of their little communities. Each company has its rules and regulations, which are not merely paper-laws, but which are carried into execution with all that spirit of vigilant perseverance that characterises the Yankee. I will give you a short summary of one of these codes, for they seem to me to throw great light on some of the most striking peculiarities of this country. I will take those of the Lawrence company, which is the most recently formed; they are a revised and corrected edition of the rules and regulations, of the other companies. They bear date May 21, 1833. Article first of the general rules is as follows: "All persons employed by the Company must devote themselves assiduously to their duty during working-hours. They must be capable of doing the work which they undertake, or use all their efforts to this effect. They must on all occasions, both in their words and in their actions, show that they are penetrated by a laudable love of temperance and virtue, and animated by a sense of their moral and social obligations. The Agent of the Company shall endeavour to set to all a good example in this respect. Every individual who shall be notoriously dissolute, idle, dishonest, or intemperate, who shall be in the practice of absenting himself from divine service, or shall violate the Sabbath, or shall be addicted to gaming, shall be dismissed from the service of the Company. Art. 2. "All ardent spirits are banished from the Company's grounds, except when prescribed by a physician. All games of hazard and cards are prohibited within their limits and in the boarding-houses. The articles following from 3 to 13, determine the duties of the agent, assistant agent, foremen, watch and firemen. Article thirteenth directs, that every female employed by the Company shall live in one of the Company's boarding-houses, attend regularly at divine service, and rigidly observe the rules of the Sabbath. Article fourteenth and last, contains an appeal to the operatives, on the necessity of subordination, and on the compatibility of obedience with civil and religious liberty. There is, besides, a special rule relative to boarding-houses; it recounts, that the Company has built those houses and lets them at a low price, wholly for the good of the hands,[AG] and that the Company, therefore, imposes certain duties on the persons who hire them. It makes them responsible for the neatness and comfortable condition of the houses, the punctuality and good quality of the meals, good order and harmony among the boarders; it requires that the keepers of the houses shall receive no persons as boarders, who are not employed in the Company's works, and it obliges them to give an account of the behaviour of the girls. It also prescribes that the doors shall be shut at ten, and repeats the injunction of attendance at divine worship.

These regulations, which amongst us would excite a thousand objections and would be in fact impracticable, are here regarded as the most simple and natural thing in the world; they are enforced without opposition or difficulty. Thus in regard to Sunday, for instance, which with us is a holiday, a day of amusement and gaiety, it is here a day of retirement, meditation, silence, and prayer.[AH] This is one of the features in which the French type most strongly contrasts with the Anglo-American. In a moral and religious point of view, there prevail among us a laxity and a toleration, which form a counterpart to the American let-alone principle in political matters; whilst the principle of political authority, which has always been established in great vigour among us, under all forms of government, monarchy, empire, or republic, corresponds to the austere reserve of American manners, to their rigid habits of life, and to the religious severity which exists here by the side of the great multiplicity of sects. So true is it, that both order and liberty are essential to human nature, and that it is impossible to establish a society on one of these principles alone! If you abandon a portion of the social institutions exclusively to the spirit of liberty, be assured that the principle of order will take no less exclusive possession of some other portion. Yield up to liberty the whole field of politics, and you are compelled to give religion and manners wholly up to order. Leave manners and religion to liberty, and you find yourself obliged to strengthen the principle of order in politics, under pain of suffering society itself to fall into ruins. Such are the general laws of equilibrium which govern the nations and the universe of worlds.

Up to this time, then, the rules of the companies have been observed. Lowell, with its steeple-crowned factories, resembles a Spanish town with its convents; but with this difference, that in Lowell, you meet no rags nor Madonnas, and that the nuns of Lowell, instead of working sacred hearts, spin and weave cotton. Lowell is not amusing, but it is neat, decent, peaceable, and sage. Will it always be so? Will it be so long? It would be rash to affirm it; hitherto the life of manufacturing operatives has proved little favorable to the preservation of severe morals. So it has been in France, as well as in England; in Germany and Switzerland, as well as in France. But as there is a close connexion between morality and competence, it may be considered very probable, that while the wages shall continue to be high at Lowell, the influences of a good education, a sense of duty, and the fear of public opinion, will be sufficient to maintain good morals. Will wages, then, continue to be what they are? There are some causes which must tend to reduce them; the rates of the duties which protect American industry are progressively decreasing; on the 1st of July, 1842, they will be reduced to a maximum of 20 per cent. But, on the other hand, the processes become more perfect, the labourers grow more skilful, the capitalists are realising their outlays, and consequently will no longer expect to divide 10 or 12 per cent. A certain diminution of wages is very possible, even after that of last March, because labour is paid in the Lowell factories, better than it is in the surrounding country; but there must be limits to this diminution. In Europe, work is often wanting for the hands; here, on the other side, hands are wanting for the work. While the Americans have the vast domain in the West, a common fund, from which, by industry, each may draw for himself and by himself, an ample heritage, an extreme fall of wages is not to be apprehended.

In America as in Europe, competition among the head-workmen tends to reduce their wages; but the tendency is not increased in America, as in Europe, by the competition among the labourers, that is by an excess of hands wanting employ, for the West stands open as a refuge to all who are unemployed. In Europe, a coalition of workmen can only signify one of these two things; raise our wages or we shall die of hunger with our wives and children, which is an absurdity; or raise our wages, if you do not, we shall take up arms, which is a civil war; in Europe, there is no other possible construction to be put upon it. But in America, on the contrary, such a coalition means, raise our wages, or we go to the West. Every coalition which does not amount to this in the minds of the associates, is merely the whim of the moment, an affair of little importance. This is the reason why coalitions, which in Europe are often able to shake the firmest fabric, present no real danger to the public peace in this country, where authority is disarmed. This is the reason why European countries, burdened with an excess of population, need for their safety and welfare a West, into which each may overflow after its own manner. This also is the reason why France is right in keeping Algiers.

FOOTNOTES:

[AB] In passing into steam, water expands to one thousand seven hundred times its volume.

[AC] This railroad was constructed for 60 miles through a vast forest of oak and pine, the few houses now found along the line having been erected since the execution of the work.

[AD] The wages of a mere labourer in the factories at Lowell are from 5 to 6 dollars a week; of a man who has a trade, as a smith, dyer, 8 to 10 dollars, of the engravers of patterns on the printing cylinders, 17 or 18 dollars.

[AE] Out of one thousand females in the Lawrence mills, only eleven are married women, and nineteen widows.

[AF] Mr H. C. Carey, in his Essay on Wages (p. 89), quotes the following letter from the director of one of the factories in Lowell. "There have been in our establishment only three cases of illicit connexions, and in all three instances the parties were married immediately, several months before the birth of the child, so that in fact we have had no case of actual bastardy." Mr Carey adds, that he was informed that there had been no such case at Dover, where there is a very large manufactory. Although I do not believe that such an exemplary degree of purity prevails in all the manufacturing districts, yet I am convinced that the morale of the manufacturing operatives are in harmony with those of the rest of the population.

[AG] The company gets only 4 per cent. on the capital invested in the boarding-houses, while the average rate of dividends on the manufacturing stock is from 5 to 6 per cent. semi-annually.

[AH] In the United States, the theatres are generally closed on Sunday, out of respect for the rules of the Sabbath; the only exception to this custom is among the French population of Louisiana. In New England, religious scruples on this point are carried farther than elsewhere; thus in Boston, a by-law of the city prescribes the shutting up of the theatres on Saturday evening, because, according to some precisians, the Sabbath begins at sunset on that day.

[LETTER XIII.]

THE BANK.—SLAVERY.

Elmington, (Va.) Aug. 24, 1834.

The elections of members of the House of Representatives will take place in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the principal States in the Union, next October and November. Although the members then returned will not take their seats until the session which begins in December, 1835, yet great importance is attached to the results of these elections, even in respect to the approaching session of Congress. On both sides preparations are making with the greatest activity; both parties have chosen their text. As the harangues against an aristocracy of money have aroused the prejudices of the labouring classes, who form the majority of electors, against the Bank, the watchword of the Opposition is no longer ostensibly the Bank. But it says to the electors, referring to the late acts of the President directed against the Bank, and the doctrines which on this occasion he has put forth in his messages; "The executive power is guilty of gross usurpation; hasten to the rescue of the constitution from its monstrous encroachments. It is no longer a question about the bank; but our liberties, bought by the blood of our fathers, are at stake, and an audacious soldier, surrounded by a train of servile place-men, has dared to trifle with our dearest rights." This is certainly the best ground for the Opposition to take; for General Jackson, in the affair of the Bank, as in most other circumstances of his life, has cared little for forms. He has gone straight forward to his object, without stopping to consider where he was placing his foot.

The Administration party, which well knows how unpopular the Bank is with the multitude, since this unpopularity is chiefly its own work, talks Bank and nothing but Bank. "The Opposition," they say, "is mocking you, when it calls upon you to save the Constitution and the laws. What do they care for the Constitution and the laws? It is the Bank that they wish to save. Down with the Bank! General Jackson, the Hero of two Wars, who pushed back the English bayonets from the Union at the peril of his life, wishes to free the soil of the country from this prop of tyranny and corruption. The Bank is nothing but English influence which seeks to enslave you. It is now to be seen, whether you will be freemen or worshippers of the Golden Calf. In spite of the hypocritical protestations of the parasites of the Bank, remember, at the polls, that the question, the only question, the whole question, is Bank or no Bank." At bottom, what the Administration party says, is true; the Opposition do not give up the cause of the Bank. The question, which is at issue, and which is to be settled by the elections, is, in fact, the question of the Bank.

But whose fault is it, if the Opposition has a rightful cause to call the citizens to the defence of the Constitution? Besides, the leaders of the Democratic party felt that their policy, which consisted in setting up the local banks in opposition to to the National Bank, would necessarily fail, and that the financial and commercial interests of the country, comprising the local banks themselves, must, in the long run, rally round the Bank of the United States. The abuse which they had heaped upon the latter, would, therefore, fall directly upon the local banks. It was impossible that the democratic multitude, which had much more just grounds of complaint against the local banks, than against the Bank of the United States, by which nobody had ever lost a dollar, should not perceive this. Accordingly, after having hesitated a long time, the heads of the party seem ready to take the bold stand of openly denouncing all banks. Bank-bills, they say, are nothing but wretched rag-money; the eulogies of the metals, gold and silver, are now become the order of the day. Gold is called Jackson money; the United States mint has been actively employed in striking gold coins, half-eagles and quarter-eagles. The principal journals of the Jackson party pay the daily wages of their journeymen printers in gold; the warm friends of the Administration affect to carry gold pieces in their pockets, and as paper only is generally used here in business transactions, even of the most trifling amount, you may be certain that a man who is seen with gold in his hands, is a Jackson-man. The President lately made a visit to his seat in Tennessee, and paid his expenses all along the road in gold, and the Globe, his official organ, took care to inform the public of it. At a dinner, given in honour of him, by the citizens of Nashville, he proposed this toast: "Gold and silver, the only currency recognised by the constitution!"

This apotheosis of gold and silver, abstractly considered, is all very well; hitherto the metals have made too small a proportion of the currency of the United States; gold, particularly, was never met with. At its last session Congress removed one of the obstacles to gold remaining in the country and taking the place of small bank notes, by raising its legal value. How far this act will effect its object of keeping a certain quantity of gold in the country, I know not; but I am persuaded, that the only prompt and effectual means of sweeping away the small bills, will be a National Bank. The prudent and experienced men of the party will certainly resist a formal declaration of war against all banks; but it is hardly to be avoided, that in the democratic party, the most rash and the most violent should give the law to the men of moderation and experience. In this event, Mr Van Buren will have need of all his address to preserve discipline in the ranks. He is too well acquainted with the commercial situation of the United States, to allow himself to dwell one moment on such a project as the destruction of the banks. His creed is the overthrow of the Bank of the United States, not because it is a bank, but because, in his view, its existence is contrary to the constitution.

The tactics of the Opposition have already given it success in some partial and unimportant elections, but even if they should have the majority in the next Congress, it would be but an incomplete victory, for the Bank would not be preserved. Many persons who have joined the Opposition because its watchword was the Constitution and the laws, would have kept aloof, had they seen the name of the Bank joined with them, so rooted is the jealousy of this useful institution. Admitting, then, that the Opposition triumphs in the coming elections, it will be necessary to set some new springs in motion in order to save the Bank. It is easy to refer at present to one on which the friends of the Bank will not fail to rely.

The Union, homogeneous as it is in regard to language and general character, is subdivided, as I have already said, into three groups, daily becoming more and more strongly marked. North of the Potomac, the States are poor in soil, but enriched by commerce[AI] and manufactures; there are the great commercial towns, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and the secondary ports of Salem, Portland, New Bedford, Nantucket, and Providence; there, also, are almost all the manufactures of the Union. These States do not admit slavery, with the exception of Maryland, where the slaves are on the decrease, and the Lilliputian State of Delaware, where slavery has, in fact, almost disappeared. South of the Potomac, between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, are the slave-holding States, wholly agricultural, and the only part of the country in which cultivation is conducted on a great scale, producing cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, without mechanical industry, and having but little commerce, except the coasting trade, the foreign trade being in the hands of the North. In the West, reaching from the great lakes southwards, and lying on the Ohio and the Mississippi, is a tract of the highest fertility, in which, since the peace of 1783, have grown up the new States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, besides Michigan, which is now on the point of becoming a State. These are also agricultural States, producing corn and cattle of all kinds, yielding whiskey and salted provisions, cultivated by free hands, and in which property is so far subdivided, that each family has its own farm.

Of these three groups, the North is most interested in the existence of a Central Bank; it is there, also, that the financial machinery of the Union is most thoroughly understood, and it is most fully perceived, that such a Bank is one of its most indispensable wheels. But the North alone, even with the support of some commercial towns in the South and West, such as New Orleans and Cincinnati, does not make up a majority, and in the North itself, in the rural districts back of New York and Philadelphia, a jealousy of the commerce of the cities prevails, which is worse than injustice, for it is ingratitude, and which displays itself by a blind hostility to the Bank. In a word, although the question of a National Bank is considered almost a question of existence by the great commercial capitals of the North, without whose enterprise that region would be still little better than a wilderness, yet the North is far from being unanimous in favour of such an institution, and were it so, would not alone be able to save it. The North, then, must seek allies in the South or the West; there are some symptoms of the increase of the Opposition in the West, but this is only because the question of the Bank has been temporarily left out of view. The West does not favour the Bank nor the banks. The hatred of these eminently democratic States to the banking system is formally proclaimed in the constitutions of Indiana and Illinois, by which banks are expressly prohibited, unless the State think proper to establish one itself, with its own funds; a measure which each has already made preparations to adopt. It is to the South, then, that the North must look for help.

The inhabitants of the South and the North are very different from each other in many points (See Letter X.), and in a certain degree there are the same analogies and the same contrasts between the North and the South, as between England and France.[AJ] The South, like, France, is most distinguished for the brilliant qualities; the North, like England, for the solid; great ideas have their origin rather in the South; good execution belongs rather to the North. The North is gifted with the English perseverance, at once the pledge and the condition of success; the South, like us, is easily moved, but easily discouraged; all ardour at the outset, but disconcerted by a check from any unforeseen obstacle. It was a matter of general surprise through the Union last year, that the South Carolinians had completed, and completed in a good style of execution, a railroad from Charleston to Augusta; the distance is equal to that from Havre to Paris. From the intermixture of northern with southern men in Congress, we find in that body a spirit of calculation and a practical good sense combined with a lively imagination and large views; the well balanced combination of these opposite qualities explains the union of boldness and wisdom which generally characterises the acts of that body. Until recently, when the West has suddenly loomed up, and taken its stand by the side of these two rivals, the domestic politics of the United States have consisted in maintaining the balance between the North and the South.[AK]

There are important differences in the political views of the North and the South. The North has more respect for the Federal bond, and is disposed to tighten rather than to relax it. The South has the opposite tendency. The South is opposed to the tariff, to the system of internal improvements by the Federal government, to whatever tends to enlarge the influence of the Federal authority. "The lighter is the Federal yoke," says the South, "the more easily it will be borne, the less cause there will be to fear, that any of the members of the confederation will be tempted to shake it off." "By relaxing too much the Federal bond," says the North, "you destroy it. If you go on thus, even for a short time, the Union will be dissolved indeed, and will exist only in name; the slightest accident will then be enough to abolish even the name." In all these quarrels, however, even in that of Nullification, when a part of the South threatened to break the Federal compact, they have hitherto come to an understanding. Concessions have been made by both sides, but more often by the North than by the South, and as they have so long continued to preserve a Union, there is room to hope, that they will still be able to live together for a long time to come.

The general leaning of the South to an interpretation of the constitution most favourable to the sovereignty of the States, has led many of the southern politicians to maintain the doctrine of the unconstitutionality of the Bank; although in opposition to a formal decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, the chief-justice of which, Judge Marshall, is more revered throughout the Union, than any other southern man, and even more so in the South than elsewhere. The Constitution, say the States' rights puritans, does not give Congress power to establish a Bank of the United States. On the other side, if they are ticklish as to what they call the encroachments of one branch of the national government, the Congress, they are not less so as to those of which the Opposition accuses another branch, that is, the President. Thus at the same moment that they combat the Bank, they combat the President also, on account of his measures against the Bank. This third party is numerous in Virginia. Now allowing the conclusions of the States' right party relative to the Bank to be founded on a strict interpretation of the law, they are none the less inadmissible in practice. And as it is impossible in the United States to give currency to the maxim, push the colonies rather than principle, the North entertains the hope that the States' rights party, after the example of some of its leaders, such as Mr Calhoun and Mr McDuffie, will relax a little of the rigour of their theories. The Administration, on the other hand, is doing its utmost to preserve the theoretical notions of Virginia on the Bank question in all their original purity on their native soil, and Mr Van Buren, who is far-sighted, lately sent the following toast to a 4th of July dinner in that State: "Unqualified war on the Bank of the United States."

The North, fortunately for itself, has a means of acting upon the South, by slavery. This requires some explanation. At the time of the declaration of Independence (1776), slavery existed in all the States. During the war of the Revolution, Pennsylvania, in 1780, adopted a plan which soon exterminated it within her limits; Massachusetts, in 1781, proclaimed slavery to be incompatible with the laws already existing; the other States of New England, and finally New York, and the other States north of the Potomac, with the exception of Delaware and Maryland, adopted measures similar to those of Pennsylvania.[AL] This was an easy matter for these States, their slaves not forming more than one twentieth or one fifteenth of the whole population. But it was a very different affair in the South, where the proportion of slaves was six or seven times greater, and where all the rural labour and menial services were performed by slaves; the institution of slavery was, therefore, permitted to stand, in the South. The acquisition of Louisiana and Florida has enlarged the number of slave States, and by an oversight, which will one day be bitterly rued, slavery has been authorised in some of the new States, such as Missouri, where it would be easy to do without the blacks.[AM] In 1790, there were 660,000 slaves[AN] distributed in six States, one Territory, and the Federal District; in 1830 there were 2,000,000, in twelve States, two Territories, and the Federal District. The white population of the slave section, in 1790, was 1,250,000, or as 190 to 100; in 1830, it was 3,760,000, or as 186 to 100. The proportional increase of the slave population would appear still greater if we added the free blacks, and struck out the States of Delaware and Maryland. In 1830, the number of slaves in Louisiana and South Carolina was greater than that of the whites.

In our days, slavery is a scourge to all the countries in which it exists; of this the people of the United States, in the South as well as in the North, are convinced; but how to put an end to it? The bloody experiment of St. Domingo and its fatal consequences to the majority of the blacks themselves, offer no encouragement to immediate emancipation. The great experiment just making by the English government in its colonies,[AO] is not yet advanced enough to afford any light. Besides, the English colonies contain only about one third of the number of slaves now in the United States. And supposing the slaves once emancipated, what shall be done with them? This question is the most embarrassing of all, to one who is acquainted with the wretched condition of the free blacks in the United States. (See Note 16.) On the other hand, the difficulties increase with the progress of time, and the Southern States are, or think they are, obliged to adopt measures in regard to the black population, which may be defended by the plea of necessity, but which are nevertheless excessively harsh.[AP]

In spite of all the precautions against an insurrection of the blacks, the solicitude of the Southern States continually increases; from the first of this month the blacks in the English West Indies, which are within three days' sail of the United States, are partially free. Between those islands and the southern and northern ports, there is an active commerce, and the communication is frequent. Finally, religious proselytism, which has carried the measure of emancipation in England, has its organs in the United States. There are not wanting philanthropists in Boston, Philadelphia, and Ohio, who are always ready to facilitate the escape of runaway slaves. Last winter, while I was at Richmond, 40 or 50 slaves disappeared, and there is no doubt that the fanatics of Philadelphia or New England furnished them the means of flight. The question of slavery, then, is, of all others, the most deeply interesting and alarming to the Southern States. Whenever it has been raised, even indirectly and secondarily, they have vehemently remonstrated; the moment it is touched, their voice is heard; this is their weak side; here the North has a hold upon them.

In regard to slavery, the Northern States have never departed from the policy of concession. This conduct of the North may even appear like culpable connivance, to Europeans not aware that the most precious treasure of North America, that is to say, the Union, has been at stake. The Northern States have written in their laws all that the South has demanded; they have granted to the southern master the right to claim his runaway slave before their own courts, so that the republican soil of the North does not enjoy the privilege which belongs to some of the monarchical countries of Europe, that of giving liberty to whoever sets his foot upon it. The North has permitted slavery to be maintained in the Federal District, in Washington, at the foot of the Capitol steps. The North, seeing the South in a flame on the Missouri question, stifled its just repugnance to her admission. The North, which has an interest in the recognition of Hayti, has yielded that point, because the South declares that it would be an encouragement to the slaves to revolt. Thus to maintain harmony in the Union, the North has pushed its concessions even to silencing its religious feelings, its principles of liberty, its commercial interests. As the Union promotes the good of all, all ought to be ready to make sacrifices to preserve it, and it would be just, that the South should renounce its theories about the constitutionality of a National Bank, theories which are belied by long practice, and which have been formally condemned by judges, of whom the South itself is proud.

Some months ago the public clamour imposed silence on the Abolition Societies in the North, whose object is the abolition of slavery in the South. The newspapers contain details of the devastation and pillage committed by a handful of people on the poor, inoffensive blacks, during three consecutive nights of July, in New York, and during the same number in Philadelphia, about a week ago. Far be it from me to accuse the Opposition, which has the majority in these two cities, of having been an accomplice of these wretches! Yet I believe I state a fact when I say, that those terrible riots, in which houses, schools, and churches were plundered and pulled down every evening by the dozen, and in which peaceable persons of colour were robbed and personally abused, would have been more promptly repressed, had not the North, above all things else, been eager to punish the Abolitionists, and to show to the South that it had nothing in common with them. The North, in a word, has given and continues to give to the South every conceivable guarantee on the subject of slavery. The South, which may one day need, not merely the passive forbearance, but the active aid of the North against insurrection, should consider if the North exacts too much in return, in asking toleration for an institution indispensable to the North, and from which the South itself has received nothing but favours.

FOOTNOTES:

[AI] In 1833, out of 108 millions the ports of the north imported 96 million dollars. Deducting the imports of New Orleans, those of all the Southern States were only of the value of 2,700,000 dollars. The exports of the South are much greater than its imports.

[AJ] I asked a fellow countryman, established at Richmond, whose patriotism had not been cooled by a long absence from France, why he preferred Richmond to the northern cities, which, in some respects, are more favourable to business; "Because," he replied, "the Virginians are the French of America."

[AK] It has always been endeavoured to balance the number of non-slave-holding States, as much as possible, by an equal number of slave States; by this means, the Senate would be exactly divided between the two interests. In 1789, six of the thirteen States admitted slavery; in 1792, there were 16 States, equally divided between the two systems; in 1802, out of 17 States, nine did not admit slavery, but in 1812, the admission of Louisiana restored the balance. From 1816 to 1819, four States were admitted, Alabama and Mississippi, slave-holding, Indiana and Illinois, non-slave-holding. In 1820, Maine, without slaves, and in 1821 Missouri with slaves, followed. In 1836 Michigan at the north, and Arkansas at the south, were received into the Union, and next will come the turn of the slave-holding Florida, and the non-slave-holding Wisconsin. It should be observed that Delaware, in which slavery is allowed by law, may be considered a non-slave-holding State, and is often reckoned so. The President has generally been from the South.

[AL] They consisted in declaring all persons born after a certain period free, the children of a slave to remain in the service of her owner during a certain number of years.