of the traveller who publishes an account of some distant and
comparatively unimportant country. How warily will they compare
the measurements of a pyramid, or the description of a ruin; and
how sternly will they censure any inaccuracy in these
contributions of merely curious knowledge, while they will
receive, with eagerness and unhesitating faith, the gross
misrepresentations of coarse and obscure writers, concerning a
country with which their own is placed in the most important and
delicate relations. Nay, they will even make these apocryphal
volumes text-books, on which to enlarge, with a zeal and an
ability worthy of a more generous cause.

I shall not, however, dwell on this irksome and hackneyed topic;
nor should I have adverted to it, but for the undue interest
apparently taken in it by my countrymen, and certain injurious
effects which I apprehend it might produce upon the national
feeling. We attach too much consequence to these attacks. They
cannot do us any essential injury. The tissue of
misrepresentations attempted to be woven round us, are like
cobwebs woven round the limbs of an infant giant. Our country
continually outgrows them. One falsehood after another falls off
of itself. We have but to live on, and every day we live a whole
volume of refutation.

All the writers of England united, if we could for a moment
suppose their great minds stooping to so unworthy a combination,
could not conceal our rapidly growing importance and matchless
prosperity. They could not conceal that these are owing, not
merely to physical and local, but also to moral causes--to the
political liberty, the general diffusion of knowledge, the