Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
History
Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1
Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
Canada -- Description and travel; Ontario -- Description and travel
"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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