The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
a fact often ludicrously and sometimes lugubriously set forth, that
millions of sturdy English folk have lived for many years, and live at
this hour, in a state of quaking trepidation as to the designs of a
single man of "ideas" across their Channel. What bulletin have the
English people ever read from day to day with such an intermittent pulse
as that with which they peruse quotations from the "Moniteur"? The
English people, whatever might have been true of them once, are now
the last people in the world--matched and overawed as they are by the
French--to charge upon another people a timid sensitiveness for even the
slightest intimations of foreign feeling and possible intentions.
We must allow also for exceptions to the sweep of the specific charges
under which we shall express our grievances at the general course of
English treatment towards us. There have been messages in many private
letters from Englishmen and Englishwomen of high public and of dignified
private station, there have been editorials and communications in a few
English papers, there have been brief utterances in Parliament, and
from leading speakers at political, mercantile, literary, and religious
assemblies, which have shown a full appreciation of the import of our
present strife, and have conveyed to us in words of most precious and
grateful encouragement the assurance that many hearts are beating with
ours across the sea. That the truculence and venom of some of our own
papers may have repressed the feeling and the utterance of this same
sympathy in many individuals and ways where it might otherwise have
manifested itself is not unnatural, and is very probable. We acknowledge
most gratefully the cheer and the inspiration which have come to us from
every word, wish, and act from abroad that has recognized the stake of
our conflict; and we will take for granted the real existence and the
glowing heartiness of much of the same which has not been expressed, or
has not reached us. Farther even than this we will go in tempering or
qualifying the utterance of our grievances. We will take for granted
that very much of the coldness, or antipathy, or contemptuousness, or
misrepresentation which we have recognized in the general treatment of
us and our cause by Englishmen is to be accounted to actual ignorance
or a very partial understanding of our real circumstances and of the
conditions of the conflict, and of the relations of parties to it. De
Tocqueville is universally regarded among us as the only foreigner
who ever divined the theoretical and the practical method of our
institutions. Englishmen, English statesmen even, have never penetrated
to the mystery of them. Many intelligent British travellers have seemed
to wish to do so, and to have tried to do so. But the study bothers
them, the secret baffles them. They give it up with a gruff impatience
which writes on their features the sentence, "You have no right to have
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account