“You see from this that the two systems of government, the English and the American, are the reverse of each other. The one exacts all it can from labor, and deprives the poor of education, while we favor the laborer in every possible way, and provide that every youth in the United States can have a good school education, whether the parents pay a penny of taxes or not, and in many states, school books are also provided free of charge.
“We begin to build our social structure at the bottom with education and the elevation of the poor; the English system begins at the top and builds downwards.
“Our prevailing idea is that wealth obtained by extortion to feed the pampered tastes of the few, while the poor may groan in their undeserved poverty and ignorance, is contrary to the dictates of morality, religion and sound political economy.”
Then we were interrupted by the excitement caused by a shoal of porpoises racing alongside the steamer. This over, we resumed our seats under the life-boat, and he continued, “The aristocracy favored this taxation, as it would lessen their own contributions to Government. The time serving church, to ingratiate itself with the king, encouraged it. The court was notoriously composed of incapable men and pliable flatterers most suitable to the nature of his majesty. The king, thus encouraged, too arrogant and pig-headed to listen to the few sensible patriots in his realm, took the best possible means—brute force—to alienate the colonists, to compel them to rebel and fight to the death or for independence, ‘a war,’ says an English historian, not American, ‘most disgraceful to a civilized nation. An army with its foreign mercenaries desolating the country, giving no quarter and employing the savages to outrage and massacre helpless women and children.’
“We still have an inheritance left us by that Hessian army, the Hessian fly, that every year attacks our fields of grain and is said to have been brought over by them, a perpetual reminder of those foreign mercenaries. Among the war expenses laid before Parliament was a bill for scalping knives that had been given to the savage fiends and paid for by Christian England for the benefit of her exiled people.
“I am not talking at random for some of my ancestral relatives were the victims of those barbarities, and horrible are the recitals handed down to us, one of the survivors being fortunate in living years afterwards, but with a scalp made of other material than that which nature had endowed him. It was a war most unjust, atrocious in its ferocity and horrible cruelties, inflicted upon a people, the kinsmen of the English as they now call us, whose only offense was that they objected to being robbed of their properties and their just rights; to taxation without representation.
“They say, why bring this up now? If the English can gloat over their victory at Waterloo and their various conquests, why should we not be proud of our victory? If any American should forget the sufferings and heroism by which the freedom he now enjoys was obtained, he should be outlawed and kicked through the country and out of it. I said that the church encouraged the war against the colonies. It did more. This is what a clergyman of that church said in a sermon against the ‘rebels,’ as they were styled. ‘How will the supporters of this anti-Christian warfare endure their sentence, endure their own reflections, endure the fire that forever burns, the worm that never dies, the hosannas of heaven while the smoke of their torments will ascend forever and ever?’ He now, poor fellow is where he can probably see what a donkey he made of himself.
“Says an English historian: ‘In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty, and it is certain that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded in fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking and of expressing our thoughts is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded. Hence it must happen in such a government as that of Britain that the established clergy, while things are in their natural situation will always be of the court party.’”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Another day I got my fellow passenger started on American history. He said: “The greatest crime of England against the United States was the introduction of African slavery into the colonies. There were fortunes to be made in kidnapping the people of Africa and transporting them to the colonies.