“If the higher classes claim superior respect, it is but just they should pay for it, as the higher classes do in Europe, where a man is charged according to his rank; but how few of your fashionable people are willing to lay out an additional groat for the distinction they so ardently covet. They want to be esteemed merely because they are rich, though their wealth does not benefit any of their fellow-citizens.”
“I remember a young Bostonian,” observed my cicerone, “who employed a second-rate barber to cut his hair. The task not being performed to his satisfaction, he indignantly rose from the chair, placed a piece of twelve and a half cents (the usual price being twenty-five) on the table, and, opening the door with great fury, told the affrighted little Frenchman that he should never patronise him again.
“Such instances of the liberality of our first people,” he continued, “occur every day; as you may yourself witness by frequenting our market. Every one of our gentlemen purchases his own provisions, so as to render the collusion of the servants with the tradespeople, which you know exists to a lamentable extent in England, wholly impossible. Our aristocracy, I can assure you, are a shrewd people; but unfortunately for the comforts of domestic life, their servants are equally shrewd, and stay with their calculating masters no longer than they can help it.
“This state of things,” added he, after a pause, “does not exist at the South. There the veriest fault of the people is generosity. The slaves, who enable them to be aristocratic without being mean, stand to them in the relation of vassals to their lords; and the planters, not fearing the power and political influence of their slaves, but, on the contrary, having an interest in their physical well-being, treat them generally with humanity and kindness. There never was a great moral evil, without producing also some good; and thus it is that the very relation between master and slave engenders ties and affections which no one can understand without having witnessed their effect. I have seen the wives of planters watch at the sick-bed of their slaves, and perform acts of charity which the misconstrued self-esteem of our Northern people would have deemed menial, merely because the feelings of kindness and gratitude, which are strongest in the Southern States, are, with us, construed into obligation and payment; two things which effectually destroy all poetry of life, even in the relation of parents to their children. I am not here disposed to underrate the miseries of slavery, as they will always appear to the mind of an European; but I cannot entirely overlook some of the advantages which result from it to the moral and social relations of the country.”
And I could not but agree with my cicerone. If the tendency of wealth in the Northern States is towards an aristocracy of money, the aristocracy of the Southern States, founded on birth and education, is a sort of offset to it,—a means of preventing the degeneration of the high-minded democracy which once swayed the country, into a vulgar oligarchy of calculating machines without poetry, without arts, and without generosity.
“After all, the greatest benefactors of the American people were Southerners, from the great father of the country, down to its last chivalrous defender. Southern orators are yet the most eloquent; Southern statesmen the most disinterested in their views of national politics. Genius requires a heart as well as a head, or the seed lacks the warmth necessary for its germination. Give me the man whose blood flows quickly through his veins, with his ready perception and his high sense of honour! If aristocracy, the original sin of society, must be entailed upon man in every climate, then let me at once have that of the South. Give me an aristocracy above the cares and toils of ordinary life, which has the means and the leisure to devote itself to higher pursuits than mere pecuniary gain and profit,—an aristocracy to whom national honour and glory are not words without meaning, and whose estimation of a people’s happiness is not deduced merely from its statistics of commerce and manufactures!
“I have always hoped, and still hope, that the democratic principle will, in America, prevail over all the others: but if this hope should prove delusive; if, in the phraseology of one of the ablest senators in the United States, ‘the multiplied wants of the country’ should beget an universal worship of Mammon as the means of satisfying them; then I would rather live surrounded by negroes, and, in the society of their aristocratic but high-minded and generous masters, seek some feeble consolation in the reflection that Rome and Greece were likewise cursed with slavery. I would prefer the aristocracy of the Southern States to that of the North, for precisely the same reason that I prefer, generally, a nobleman to a roturier.”
“You are not very singular in your notions,” observed my cicerone. “I do not remember a single European that came here but what expressed the same opinion; but this singular coincidence has not in the least changed the opinion of our people, who are perfectly satisfied that their city stands unrivalled in the world for virtue, wisdom, and patriotism.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Edward Everett, the present governor of Massachusetts.