[518] Flint's Letters, E. W. T.: Thwaites, ix, 87; Woods's Two Years Residence, ib. x, 255. "I saw a man this day ... his nose bitten off close down to its root, in a fight with a nose-loving neighbour." (Faux's Journal, ib. xi, 222; and see Strickland, 24-25.)
[519] The reports of American conditions by British travelers, although from unsympathetic pens and much exaggerated, were substantially true. Thus Europe, and especially the United Kingdom, conceived for Americans that profound contempt which was to endure for generations.
"Such is the land of Jonathan," declared the Edinburgh Review in an analysis in 1820 (xxxiii, 78-80) of a book entitled Statistical Annals of the United States, by Adam Seybert. "He must not ... allow himself to be dazzled by that galaxy of epithets by which his orators and newspaper scribblers endeavour to persuade their supporters that they are the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people upon earth.... They have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character....
"During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the Arts, for Literature, or even for statesman-like studies of Politics or Political Economy.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans?—what have they done in the mathematics...? under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?"
[520] Nevertheless, these very settlers had qualities of sound, clean citizenship; and beneath their roughness and crudity were noble aspirations. For a sympathetic and scholarly treatment of this phase of the subject see Pease: Frontier State, i, 69.
[521] Faux's Journal, E. W. T.: Thwaites, xi, 246.
[522] Randolph to Quincy, Aug. 16, 1812, Quincy: Quincy, 270.
[523] Marryat, 2d Series, 1.
[524] See vol. i, chap, vii, of this work.
[525] Marryat, 1st Series, 15.