Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 5, November 1847

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
Vol. XXXI. Nov, 1847. No. 5.
Contents
GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
Vol. XXXI. PHILADELPHIA, NOVEMBER, 1847. No. 5.
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BY FRANCIS J. GRUND.
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Whatever our political independence may be, we are slavish imitators of Europe in every thing appertaining to society. We may boast of being republicans—we may beard England and France, conquer the Mexicans and annex Cuba, but we dare not get up a coat or a pantaloon, or a morning-dress, or a peignoir of a lady, without first waiting for the fashion plates of Paris. What is taste but a sense of the fitness of things—the intuition of propriety—and why should we not lay claim to it as well as other nations. John Bull, in that respect, is a much more remarkable man; not only is he stock-English at home, but an Englishman wherever he goes—in Canton and St. Petersburgh, in Constantinople or Paris—wherever he sojourns he founds, or assists in founding, an English colony, governed by English laws, English fashions, English tastes, and all the substantial customs of his foggy and smoky island. Nothing tempts him to forego his Anglicism. He breakfasts on a steak in India, as he does on Ludgate Hill, and has made the establishment of butchers’ shops in the Asiatic possessions of England an important item of legislation;—he has established coffee-houses in Paris, where you get, par excellence, a biftec à l’anglaise—he has established Hotels d’Angleterre in every habitable town and village of Europe, and he has colonized the world with English shoemakers, tailors, and other artisans of every description. Let him go where he may, he prefers the productions of his country to every other, and even deals in preference with his countrymen, though he knows they cheat him. He would rather be circumvented by his own countrymen than pay an additional frank to a Frenchman.
Wherever half a dozen English families are congregated, there is a loyal English association for the preservation of the purity of English manners, English patriotism, and the holy and essential connection of Church and State. As a matter of course, whenever they can afford to pay for a preacher, they have their English chapel, and if a nobleman happens to get among them, they have their English genealogies, their court and their toadies. In former days they were at least obliged, when traveling, to study French, or some other European language, but since English is spoken all over the world, from the lady in the drawing-room to the garçon of the hotel and the café, the incoherent monosyllables of which English conversation is usually composed, will answer for an overland journey to Calcutta. Even in this country the English remain attached to their habits and customs, and to the fashions of their own modern Babylon.