Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

He says that "In energy, perseverance, enterprise, sagacity, activity, and varied resources" the Americans infinitely surpass the British; that he never met with "a stupid American." That our "American children" surpass us not only in our good, but "in our evil peculiarities." This I cannot understand; for, surely, if we have peculiarities, which there is no denying, they must by all the rules of logic be limited to ourselves.

But the writer observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the æsthetic faculty—what an abominable word æsthetic is! it always puts me in mind of asthmatic, for it is broken-winded learning.

"Is it not common," says he, "in modern England to reject authorities both in Church and State, to look with contempt on the humbler and more peculiarly christian virtues of contentment and submission, and to cultivate the intellectual at the expense of the moral part of our nature? If these and other dangerous tendencies of a similar nature are at work among ourselves, as they undoubtedly are, it is useful and interesting to observe them in fuller operation and more unchecked luxuriance in America."

Now, it is very satisfactory, that the Americans, a race of yesterday, who have had no opportunity as yet of coping with the deep research and master-minds of Europe, should in half a century have leaped into such a position in the civilized world as to have exceeded the Englishman in all the most useful relations of life, as well as in all its darker and more dangerous features; very satisfactory indeed that the mixed race peopling the United States should be better and worse than that nation to which the world, by universal consent, has yielded the palm of superiority in all the arts and in all the sciences of modern acquirement.

Wherein do the Americans exceed the sons of Britain? In history, in policy, in poetry, in mathematics, in music, in painting, or in any of the gifts of the Muses? Are they more renowned in the dreadful art of war? or in the mild virtues of peace? Is the fame of America a wonder and a terror to the four quarters of the globe?—We may fearlessly reply in the negative. The outer barbarian knows the American but as another kind of Englishman. It will yet take him some centuries to distinguish between the original and the offspring.

It is, in short, as untenable as an axiom in policy or history, that the American exceeds the Briton in the development of mind, as it is that the American exceeds the Briton in the development of the baser qualities of our nature.

When the insatiate thirst for dollars, dollars, dollars, has subsided, then the American may justly rear his head as an aspirant for historic fame. His land has never yet produced a Shakespeare, a Johnson, a Milton, a Spenser, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke, a Coke, or a Rennie. The utmost America has yet achieved is a very faint imitation of the least renowned of our great writers, Walter Scott.

In diplomacy I deny also the palm. For although India is a case in point, like as Texas, yet even there we have never first planted a population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government, but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms. We have not snatched from a weak republic, whose principles had been expressly formed on our own model, that which poverty alone obliged it to relinquish. If the writer, who appears to be an excellent man and a good christian, had lived for several years on the borders of the eagerly desired Canada, I very much doubt whether he would have seen such a couleur de rose in the transactions of the mighty commonwealth, where the rulers are the ruled, and where education, intellect, integrity, innocence, and wealth must all alike bow before the Juggernaut of an unattainable perfection of equality.

If Bill Johnson, the mail robber and smuggler, is as good as William Pitt or any other William of superior mind, why then the sooner the millennium of democracy arrives the better. It is unfortunate for the present generation—what it will be for the next no man can pretend to say—that this debasing principle is gaining ground not only in Canada but in England. A reflecting mind has no objection to the creed that all men were created equal; but history, sacred and profane, plainly shows that mind as well as matter is afterwards, for the wisest of purposes, very differently developed.

Does the meanest white American, the sweeper of Broadway, if there be such a citizen, believe in this perfection of equality amongst men as a fundamental axiom of the rights of man? Place a black sweeper of crossings in juxtaposition, and the question will very soon solve itself. Why, the free and enlightened citizens will not even permit their black or coloured brethren to worship their common Creator in the same pew with themselves—it is horror, it is degradation! And yet there is a universal outcry about sacred liberty and equality all over the Union. The angels weep to witness the tricks of men placed in a little brief authority. Can such a state of things last as that, where the Irish labourer is treated as an inferior being in the scale of creation, and the Negro, or the offspring of the Negro and the white, is branded with the stigma of servile? It cannot—it will not. Either let democracy assume its true and legitimate features, or let it cease—for the re-action will be a fearful one, as dread and as horribly diabolical as that which the folly of the aristocracy of old France brought on that devoted land.