If it be a matter of pride, as an English poetess appears to think, for a nation to strew its dead over the face of the globe, * then Great Britain certainly won fresh laurels in this war; for her soldiers who fell in it found graves six thousand miles apart: in the depths of Lake Erie, about the great falls of Niagara, and along the Thames and St. Lawrence; in the Atlantic, both near the American coast and almost within sight of their own shores; in Long Island Sound,
* Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep,
Where rest not England's dead.
—Mrs. Hemans
in the Chesapeake, and beyond the western edge of civilization; before the defences of Baltimore and New Orleans, and in the waters of the South Pacific. And her expeditions had been especially fatal to their commanders: Gen. Brock had fallen at Queenstown, Gen. Tecumseh at the Thames, Ross and Sir Peter Parker before Baltimore, Pakenham and Gibbs at New Orleans, with many of lower rank but hardly less responsibility; while seven commanders of her men-of-war—Lambert, Downie, Dickenson, Manners, Peake, Barrette, and Blythe—had all died on their bloody decks. But by her sacrifice of life and property she had gained absolutely nothing. She had not acquired an inch of territory, or established any principle of international law, or purchased for herself any new privilege, or secured any old one. The war had cost the United States a hundred million dollars in money, and thirty thousand lives; and a large portion of both the money and the lives had been squandered, when with ordinary skill and care they might have been saved. But she had something to show for it. If she had not fully relieved her from tier of the atrocities of the Indians, she had at least cut off their supplies from British sources, and possessed herself of all the western posts; she had put an end to the systematic violation of her rights on the ocean, and in so doing had demonstrated the superiority of American seamanship; she had completely established her national independence.
It is to be hoped that no American youth who reads this little history will cherish any feeling of resentment or hatred toward the people whose fathers were so grievously unjust to ours. The day for that—if ever there was a day for it—has gone completely by. England has evidently passed the zenith of her power and glory; America is still rising toward hers, and how great she shall ultimately become, will be measured mainly by the breadth and generosity of the American mind. In the past sixty years we have lived down the most celebrated sneer in history. Five years after this war, the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburgh Review: "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 mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses, or eats from American plates, or wears American coats or gowns, or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow citizens may buy and sell and torture?" If Mr. Smith were now living, he might be answered—if it were worth while to answer him at all—that the most widely circulated of all novels was written by an American woman; that the poet most read in England was an American; that our two standard dictionaries of the English language are both American; that several American magazines count their subscribers in Great Britain by tens of thousands; that the world owes its use of anaesthetics to an American physician; that American sculptors, painters, and actors hold their own with those of other nations; that America has the largest telescopes, and the most successful astronomers; that American reapers cut the world's harvests, and American sewing machines make its garments; that the telegraph and the telephone are American inventions; that the first steamboat was built in America, and it was an American steamship that first crossed the Atlantic, while our country contains more miles of railway than all Europe; that those who eat from American plates, eat the largest and best dinners in the world; and as for American glasses, altogether too many people drink out of them. Unless we mercifully left his final question unanswered, we should be obliged to say, that the United States had gotten rid of slavery, while to-day five million British subjects, all within two days' journey of the throne, tell us they find themselves virtually slaves.
Yet with all our material and intellectual progress, we have hardly a right to be proud. For we have enjoyed peculiar advantages. The Mayflower did not land her pilgrims on a narrow island, but on the edge of a great continent. Of that continent we have the most productive zone, stretching from ocean to ocean, and a thousand miles in breadth; while within that zone our Government has given us, for the support of educational institutions, as much land as the entire area of Great Britain and Ireland. At the same time, we have not been loaded down with a standing army, an established church, a vast landed aristocracy, and all the rubbish of royalty. In America labor receives its highest wages, and pauperism finds its least excuse. It will be no special credit to us if we become in the next half century the most powerful and prosperous and generous of nations; but it will be a great shame to us if we do not.
As we read the history of our country's early struggles, it may help us to avoid any unworthy feeling of resentment if we bear in mind the fact that there is a wide and peculiar discrepancy of character between the English people and the English Government. That people perhaps at present the most enlightened on earth, are justly noted for their innate love of fair play; for their continual struggles toward liberty, and their development of the great principles of jurisprudence; but that Government, in its dealings with other powers, has been for centuries arbitrary, selfish, barbarous, and inconsistent to the last degree. Priding itself upon legitimacy, it has befriended a bloody usurpation in France, because it hated the alternative of French republicanism. It has opened the ports of China with its cannon, for the purpose of selling there a narcotic drug of which it holds the monopoly. It boasted its abolition of the slave trade; yet when our country was at war over the slavery question, its sympathies were all with the slaveholders. Seventy years ago, as we have seen, its cruisers cared nothing for the neutrality of any harbor in which a hostile ship of fewer guns was riding at anchor; but twenty years ago it could not offer its neutral hospitalities too lavishly to privateers that had not a port of their own to hail from or sail to, and were burning all their prizes at sea without adjudication. It witnessed the dismemberment of Denmark with scarcely a protest, but has sacrificed thousands of English lives to maintain the Turk in Europe. It has stood for years at the head of a great conspiracy to keep Russia shut up in the centre of a continent long after her industrial growth and commercial importance have entitled her to a broad and unobstructed outlet to the highway of nations. It has eaten India into famine, and is now laying its kleptic fingers on the great island of Borneo, and apparently making ready to consume the continent of Africa.
We must blush for these things while we execrate them; for we ourselves are Englishmen. That famous little island, with its green lanes and waving woodlands, its busy towns and historical hamlets, was the home of our ancestors, and must ever have for us the highest romantic interest of any spot on earth; and we cannot too warmly sympathize with those who are still bearing burdens of feudal days, when the bravery of feudal leadership has long since passed away. Let us never forget how near of kin we are to the English people; but God forbid that we should inherit the vices of the English Government, or copy its crimes!
If the story of a war like that we have been reading of teaches anything, it teaches the broad wisdom of dealing justly, and the ultimate folly of all chicanery, violence, and wrong.