character, whatever it is, is it any thing more than our own, a little
exaggerated, perhaps? Their virtues and their vices, their faults and
their excellences, are just the virtues and the vices, the faults and
the excellences, of that old respectable freeholder, John Bull, from
whom they are descended. We are not much surprised that a nation which
are slaves themselves should make other men slaves. This cannot very
much surprise us: but we are both surprised and we are deeply grieved,
that a nation which has conceived so well the idea of freedom--a nation
which has preached the doctrines of freedom with such boldness and such
fulness--a nation which has so boldly and perfectly realized its idea of
freedom in every other respect--should in this only instance have sunk
so completely below its own idea, and forgetting the rights of one class
of their fellow-creatures, should have deprived them of freedom
altogether. I say that our grief and our disapprobation of this in the
case of our brethren in America arises very much from this, that in
other respects we admire them so much, we are sorry that so noble a
nation should allow a blot like this to remain upon its escutcheon. I am
not ignorant--nobody can be ignorant--of the great difficulties which
encompass the solution of this question in America. It is vain for us to
shut our eyes to it. There can be no doubt whatever that great
sacrifices will require to be made in order to get rid of this great
evil. But the Americans are a most ingenious people; they are full of
inventions of all sorts, from the invention of a machine for protecting
our feet from the water, to a machine for making ships go by means of
heated air; from the one to the other the whole field of discovery is
occupied by their inventive genius. There is not an article in common
use among us but bears some stamp of America. We rise in the morning,
and before we are dressed we have had half a dozen American articles in
our hands. And during the day, as we pass through the streets, articles
of American invention meet us every where. In short, the ingenuity of