Anthony Trollope

“ The man who can see without inward tears the self-inflicted wounds of that American people can hardly have within his bosom the tenderness of an Englishman's heart.
But the strong runner will rise again to his feet, even though he be stunned by his fall. He will rise again, and will have learned something by his sorrow. His anger will pass away, and he will again brace himself for his work. What great race has ever been won by any man, or by any nation, without some such fall during its course? ”

“ The type of almost all American newspapers is wretched—I think I may say of all;—so wretched that that alone forbids one to hope for pleasure in reading them. They are ill-written, ill-printed, ill-arranged, and in fact are not readable. They are bought, glanced at, and thrown away.
They are full of boastings,—not boastings simply as to their country, their town, or their party,—but of boastings as to themselves. And yet they possess no self-assurance. It is always evident that they neither trust themselves, nor expect to be trusted. ”

“ At home in England we do not realize the importance to us in a political as well as social view of the dignity and purity of our judges, because we take from them all that dignity and purity can give as a matter of course. The honesty of our bench is to us almost as the honesty of heaven. No one dreams that it can be questioned or become questionable, and therefore there are but few who are thankful for its blessings. Few Englishmen care to know much about their own courts of law, or are even aware that the judges are the protectors of their liberties and property. ”

“ The negro domestic servant is handy at his own work; no servant more so; but he cannot go beyond that. He does not comprehend the object and purport of continued industry. If he have money he will play with it,—will amuse himself with it. If he have none, he will amuse himself without it. His work is like a schoolboy's task; he knows it must be done, but never comprehends that the doing of it is the very end and essence of his life. He is a child in all things, and the extent of prudential wisdom to which he ever attains is to disdain emancipation, and cling to the security of his bondage. ”

“ Let the slaves of all rebels be declared free; and all slave-owners in the seceding States are rebels!
One cannot but ask what abolition means, and to what it would lead. Any ordinance of abolition now pronounced would not effect the emancipation of the slaves, but might probably effect a servile insurrection. I will not accuse those who are preaching this crusade of any desire for so fearful a scourge on the land. They probably calculate that an edict of abolition once given would be so much done towards the ultimate winning of the battle. They are making their hay while their sun shines. ”

“ I for one do not grudge them all the good they can do, all the honour they can win. But I grieve over the evil name which now taints them, and which has accompanied that wider spread of democracy which the last twenty years has produced. This longing for universal suffrage in all things—in voting for the President, in voting for judges, in voting for the representatives, in dictating to senators, has come up since the days of President Jackson, and with it has come corruption and unclean hands. Democracy must look to it, or the world at large will declare her to have failed. ”

“ But I do say that it is monstrous in any people or in any person to suppose that such bickerings can afford a proper ground for war. I am not about to dilate on the horrors of war. Horrid as war may be, and full of evil, it is not so horrid to a nation, nor so full of evil, as national insult unavenged, or as national injury unredressed. A blow taken by a nation and taken without atonement is an acknowledgment of national inferiority than which any war is preferable. Neither England nor the States are inclined to take such blows. ”

“ To the Senate, in the minds of all Americans, belongs that superior prestige, that acknowledged possession of the greater power and fuller scope for action, which is with us as clearly the possession of the House of Commons. The United States' Senate can be conservative, and can be so by virtue of the constitution. The love of the constitution in the hearts of all Americans is so strong that the exercise of such power by the Senate would strengthen rather than endanger its position. ”

“ Gradually they have learned to look upon slavery as good in itself, and to believe that it has been the source of their wealth and the strength of their position. They have declared it to be a blessing inalienable,—that should remain among them for ever,—as an inheritance not to be touched, and not to be spoken of with hard words. Fifty years ago the abolitionists of the North differed only in opinion from the slave-owners of the South in hoping for a speedier end to this stain upon the nation; and in thinking that some action should be taken towards the final emancipation of the bondsmen. ”

“ The United States have been by no means barren in the production of literature. The truth is so far from this that their literary triumphs are perhaps those which of all their triumphs are the most honourable to them, and which, considering their position as a young nation, are the most permanently satisfactory. But though they have done much in writing, they have done much more in reading. As producers they are more than respectable, but as consumers they are the most conspicuous people on the earth. ”

“ There is a map of Washington accurately laid down; and taking that map with him in his journeyings a man may lose himself in the streets, not as one loses oneself in London between Shoreditch and Russell Square, but as one does so in the deserts of the Holy Land, between Emmaus and Arimathea. In the first place no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited, and desolate. ”

“ During my last week there the world of Boston was moving itself on sleighs. There was not a wheel to be seen in the town. The omnibuses and public carriages had been dismounted from their axles and put themselves upon snow runners, and the private world had taken out its winter carriages, and wrapped itself up in buffalo robes. Men now spoke of the coming thaw as of a misfortune which must come, but which a kind Providence might perhaps postpone,—as we all, in short, speak of death. In the morning the snow would have been hardened by the night's frost, and men would look happy and contented. ”

“ A generous sympathy with the North would have been an ostensible and crashing enmity to the South. We could not have sympathized with the North without condemning the South, and telling to the world that the South were our enemies. In ordering his own household a man should not want generosity or sympathy from the outside; and if not a man, then certainly not a nation. Generosity between nations must in its very nature be wrong. One nation may be just to another, courteous to another, even considerate to another with propriety. ”

“ I could not but weep in spirit as I saw the wretchedness around me,—the squalid misery of the soldiers, the inefficiency of their officers, the bickerings of their rulers, the noise and threats, the dirt and ruin, the terrible dishonesty of those who were trusted! These are things which made a man wish that he were anywhere but there. But I do believe that God is still over all, and that everything is working for good. These things are the fire and water through which this nation must pass. ”

“ Tucking your trousers up to your knees you will wade through the bogs, you will lose yourself among rude hillocks, you will be out of the reach of humanity. The unfinished dome of the Capitol will loom before you in the distance, and you will think that you approach the ruins of some western Palmyra. If you are a sportsman, you will desire to shoot snipe within sight of the President's house. There is much unsettled land within the States of America, but I think none so desolate in its state of nature as three-fourths of the ground on which is supposed to stand the city of Washington. ”

“ The very preamble of the constitution at once declares that the people of the different States do hereby join themselves together with the view of forming themselves into one nation. "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." ”

“ Motley says in the paper to which I have alluded, "No man, on either side of the Atlantic, with Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins, will dispute the right of a people, or of any portion of a people, to rise against oppression, to demand redress of grievances, and in case of denial of justice to take up arms to vindicate the sacred principle of liberty. Few Englishmen or Americans will deny that the source of government is the consent of the governed, or that every nation has the right to govern itself according to its will. ”

“ If we presume that secession will be accomplished,—and I for one am of that opinion,—has it not been well that a war should be waged with such an object as this? If those five or six States can be gained, stretching east and west from the Atlantic to the centre of the continent, hundreds of miles beyond the Mississippi, and north and south over four degrees of latitude,—if that extent of continent can be added to the free soil of the northern territory, will not the contest that has done this have been worth any money that can have been spent on it? ”

“ Such a mode of appointment would, in our estimation, at once rob them of their prestige. And our distrust would not be diminished if the pay accorded to the work were so small that no lawyer in good practice could afford to accept the situation. When we look at a judge in court, venerable beneath his wig and adorned with his ermine, we do not admit to ourselves that that high officer is honest because he is placed above temptation by the magnitude of his salary. We do not suspect that he, as an individual, would accept bribes and favour suitors if he were in want of money. ”

“ Newspapers in this country are so general that men cannot well live without them; but to men, and to women also, in the United States they may be said to be the one chief necessary of life. And yet in the whole length and breadth of the United States there is not published a single newspaper which seems to me to be worthy of praise.
A really good newspaper,—one excellent at all points,—would indeed be a triumph of honesty and of art! Not only is such a publication much to be desired in America, but it is still to be desired in Great Britain also. ”

“ It would seem to be impossible that a country so blessed should not become rich. It must be remembered that these rivers flow through lands that have never yet been surpassed in natural fertility. Of all countries in the world one would say that the States of America should have been the last to curse themselves with a war; but now the curse has fallen upon them with a double vengeance. It would seem that they could never be great in war: their very institutions forbid it; their enormous distances forbid it; the price of labour forbids it ”

“ But, although this sympathy does undoubtedly exist, I do not imagine that many Englishmen are of opinion that a confederacy of southern slave States will ever offer to the general civilization of the world very many attractions. It cannot be thought that the South will equal the North in riches, in energy, in education, or general well-being. Such has not been our experience of any slave country; such has not been our experience of any tropical country; and such especially has not been our experience of the southern States of the North American Union. I am no abolitionist ”

“ Seeing how essential and thorough are the points of variance between the North and the South, how unlike the one people is to the other, and how necessary it is that their policies should be different; seeing how deep are their antipathies, and how fixed is each side in the belief of its own rectitude and in the belief also of the other's political baseness, I cannot believe that the really southern States will ever again be joined in amicable union with those of the North. They, the States of the Gulf, may be utterly subjugated, and the North may hold over them military power. ”

“ If it be that the people, when the war is over, shall consent to live under a military or other dictatorship,—that they shall quietly continue their course as a nation without recovery of their rights of freedom, then we shall have to say that their institutions were not founded in a soil of sufficient depth, and that they gave way before the first high wind that blew on them. ”

“ He is paid no more than the others; he has no superior title; he does not take the highest rank among them; he never talks of his subordinates, but always of his colleagues; he has a title of his own, that of First Lord of the Treasury, but it implies no headship in the cabinet. That he is the head of all political power in the nation, the Atlas who has to bear the globe, the god in whose hands rest the thunderbolts and the showers, all men do know. No man's position is more assured to him. ”

“ Men and women talk of war, and of war only. Newspapers full of the war are alone read. A contract for war stores,—too often a dishonest contract,—is the one path open for commercial enterprise. The young man must go to the war or he is disgraced. The war swallows everything, and as yet has failed to produce even such bitter fruits as victory or glory. Must it not be said that a curse has fallen upon the land?
And yet I still hope that it may ultimately be for good. Through water and fire must a nation be cleansed of its faults. ”

“ Iowa must pay as much as Rhode Island; Indiana must pay as much as Massachusetts. But Rhode Island and Massachusetts could pay without the sacrifice of any comfort to its people, without any sensible suffering, an amount of direct taxation which would crush the States of Iowa and Indiana,—which indeed no tax-gatherer could collect out of those States. Rhode Island and Massachusetts could with their ready money buy Iowa and Indiana; and yet the income-tax to be collected from the poor States is to be the same in amount as that collected from the rich States. ”