I must, however, do America the justice to observe, that, although the desire to make money is universal, yet in the principal and older commercial centres, there is more honesty and less illiberality than amongst us. American selfishness is less contracted than ours; it does not stoop to petty meannesses; it operates on a more liberal scale. There are certainly wild speculators, blind and desperate gamblers here also: but the objects of their schemes are almost always enterprises of public utility. The spirit of speculation in the United States has strown this vast country with useful works, canals, railroads, turnpike-roads, with manufactories, farms, villages, and towns; amongst us it has been more rash, wild, and foolish, and much less productive in useful results. It is with us mere stock-jobbing, without any good influence on the prosperity of the country; it is a game in which the dice are loaded, in which the credulous lose the earnings of years in a fever-fit of a moment. Its only results are ruin and despair, and if it contributes to people any thing, it is the cells of the mad-house. These are sad truths, but truths which it may be useful to utter.
FOOTNOTES:
[AQ] The reason given for this refusal was the indiscreet use by a former committee of inquiry, of notes made during a similar examination.
[AR] This is a miniature frigate that takes its name from a favorite ship in the American navy, which covered herself with glory in the last war under the command of Hull, Bainbridge, and Stewart.
[AS] The able Correa, for some time Portuguese minister to the United States, used to say, that this State reminded him of the Sphinx, which had the head of an angel, and the body of a beast. This saying is often quoted in the United States.
[LETTER XV.]
PITTSBURG.
Pittsburg, November 24, 1834.
Seventy-six years ago this day, a handful of Frenchmen sorrowfully evacuated a fort, which stood on the point of land where the Alleghany and Monongahela mingle their waters to form the Ohio. The French, with their faithful allies the Indians, had made a vigourous resistance; they had defeated the expedition sent against them in 1754, and compelled Washington, then a lieutenant-colonel in the Virginia militia, to surrender Fort Necessity. They had routed the troops of the boastful Braddock, and spread terror, of which the memory is not yet effaced, through the English colonies. But the destiny of France was then in the hands of him, who of all her kings will be most severely judged by the tribunal of history. Under that most dissolute and selfish prince, France, sacrificed to the paltry intrigues of the bed-chamber, humbled at home, could not triumph abroad. The French were, therefore, obliged to abandon Fort Duquesne; on that day, November 24, 1758, one of the most magnificent schemes ever projected, was annihilated.
France had then possession of Canada and Louisiana; we were then masters of the two finest rivers, the two largest and richest basins of North America, that of the St. Lawrence and that of the Mississippi.[AT] Between these two basins nature has raised no barrier, so that in the rainy seasons, canoes can pass from Lake Michigan into the bed of the Illinois, and continue their course thence without any obstruction to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan of our heroic pioneers, priests, sailors, and soldiers, had been to found the empire of New France in this great valley. It is beyond a doubt, that this idea had attracted the attention of Louis XIV., and that its execution was already begun by the erection of a chain of posts, the sites of which were admirably chosen. There is no country in the world which comprises such an amount of so highly fertile land; none which offers natural routes of communication comparable to the net-work of navigable rivers and streams spread over this great region. There is none more healthy, for with the exception of a few points or tracts subject to autumnal fevers, but which rapidly lose this character when brought under cultivation, there are only two infected spots, New Orleans and Natchez, in which the yellow fever occasionally makes its appearance, during a few months in the year. The sums swallowed up by one of the foolish wars of Louis XV., would probably have been amply sufficient to accomplish this noble project. But the enterprise, although pushed forward by the local agents with admirable zeal and sagacity, encountered only indifference from the ministers at home, the great point of whose policy was to know, who was to be the favourite mistress of his Most Christian Majesty on the morrow. The capture of Fort Duquesne was soon followed by the conquest of all Canada by the English; and in 1763, by the treaty of Paris (these treaties of Paris never bode us any good), France, exhibiting an example of that complete submission and flat despair, of which our annals exhibit so many instances, and the English so few, ceded the basin of the St. Lawrence and the left bank of the Mississippi to England, with one hand, and the right bank of that great river to Spain, with the other.