An Autobiography of Anthony TrollopeTrollope, Anthony
General
An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
Trollope, Anthony
Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882
price than that offered. I mention the circumstance here because it
has been boasted, on behalf of the American publishers, that though
there is no international copyright, they deal so liberally with
English authors as to make it unnecessary that the English author
should be so protected. With the fact of the £20 just brought to my
knowledge, and with the copy of my book published at 7½d. now in my
hands, I feel that an international copyright is very necessary for
my protection.
They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United
States, have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language
in denouncing the sins of Americans. Who can but love their personal
generosity, their active and far-seeking philanthropy, their love of
education, their hatred of ignorance, the general convictions in the
minds of all of them that a man should be enabled to walk upright,
fearing no one and conscious that he is responsible for his own
actions? In what country have grander efforts been made by private
munificence to relieve the sufferings of humanity? Where can the
English traveller find any more anxious to assist him than the normal
American, when once the American shall have found the Englishman to
be neither sullen nor fastidious? Who, lastly, is so much an object
of heart-felt admiration of the American man and the American woman
as the well-mannered and well-educated Englishwoman or Englishman?
These are the ideas which I say spring uppermost in the minds of the
unprejudiced English traveller as he makes acquaintance with these
near relatives. Then he becomes cognisant of their official doings,
of their politics, of their municipal scandals, of their great
ring-robberies, of their lobbyings and briberies, and the infinite
baseness of their public life. There at the top of everything he
finds the very men who are the least fit to occupy high places.
American public dishonesty is so glaring that the very friends he
has made in the country are not slow to acknowledge it,--speaking of
public life as a thing-apart from their own existence, as a state
of dirt in which it would be an insult to suppose that they are
concerned! In the midst of it all the stranger, who sees so much
that he hates and so much that he loves, hardly knows how to express
himself.
"It is not enough that you are personally clean," he says, with what
energy and courage he can command,--"not enough though the clean
outnumber the foul as greatly as those gifted with eyesight outnumber
the blind, if you that can see allow the blind to lead you. It is
not by the private lives of the millions that the outside world will
judge you, but by the public career of those units whose venality is
allowed to debase the name of your country. There never was plainer
proof given than is given here, that it is the duty of every honest
citizen to look after the honour of his State."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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