Goldwin Smith

“ The free cities of Italy, of Germany, of Flanders, produced in virtue of their freedom fruits of civilisation, as well as of industry, far nobler and more abundant than those which were produced by great feudal kingdoms. But their liberties were mere burgher liberties, deeply tainted with the tyranny of guild over guild, of city over city, of the inhabitants of the cities over the peasantry beneath their sway; based upon no broad principles of equity or respect for human rights, and doomed by their vices to an extinction which we mourn for the sake of art, but which we cannot call unjust. ”

“ The Western States of America are a colony of New England. The original company of pilgrims is the seed from which the whole tree has grown. No creative monad, imagined by science, could be more pregnant with a new order of things than that little band of exiles; no moment in history is more solemn or more big with consequences than that in which the colony on its arrival in the New World made a set of laws for itself—laws for self-government—rational, unfeudal laws. ”

“ It is not only that the chains of the negro have been struck off, that the negro race is redeemed from boundless and endless misery, from boundless and endless degradation. In the person of the negro, the respect for humanity has been restored—the principles of Christian and civilised society have been vindicated—the rights and the hopes of labour have been rescued from the powers which had conspired against them. It is a victory in which every man, high or low, who lives by the sweat of his brow has a part—in which every man who lives by the sweat of his brow has reason to rejoice. ”

“ No doubt to secure courtesy in America you must cordially accept equality; but in what community is it not necessary cordially to accept the leading principle of society if you wish to be courteously treated? Manners in a certain sense are free. You are not required to put on a dress coat when you dine with a friend. But as a general rule, it did not seem to me that there was among Americans a want of mutual respect, or an unwillingness to pay reasonable deference to real social claims of any kind. In truth, equality is the necessary condition of courtesy in the proper sense of the word. ”

“ Without social fusion, how can we hope for political equality? And without political equality, what security can there be for justice? Kindness and wisdom would cure, in course of time, the slowly receding vices of the slave. Fair wages, paid at set of sun, so that even his shortened vision may see his reward as he works, would in time teach him industry: education, in the course of two or three generations, would raise his intelligence, and give him the power of self guidance. ”

“ The nation has gained in dignity and self-respect. A just pride has cast out weak vanity, and abated the loud boastfulness which at first turned many hearts away from the Federal cause. The habit of swagger sensibly diminished as the stern struggle went on. Before, America had no history: her cravings for one were visible in the anxiety with which the most equivocal monuments of antiquity were preserved. Now she has a history which even the war powers of the Old World must respect and acknowledge as a title to the fellowship of great nations. ”

“ His example and the type of character which he has set before public men, as much as the victory which his patient wisdom, his constancy, and integrity mainly achieved, will protect for ever the cause for which he toiled and died; so that, in his own words, government for the people and by the people shall never perish from the earth.
It would be wickedness, the greatest wickedness, to make a eulogy of war. War, besides the misery that it inflicts, stirs up from their depths all the evil passions of human nature. ”

“ No doubt American society, like European society, has its peculiar evils. It has some which even a foreign observer sees, and many more, we may be sure, which a foreign observer does not see, but which Americans themselves know and feel, and which give birth to political and social complaints there as mournful in tone as any that are heard here. It is not by sudden and vigorous bounds, but by slow and tottering steps that humanity advances. ”

“ Americans are supposed to be slaves to money. It is true that many Americans are slaves to money, and are hurried by the eagerness with which they pursue it through lives of unrest into early graves. It could scarcely be otherwise when human covetousness was excited by the opening wealth of a new world. It is not wonderful that the looks of the throng should be keener, and their steps more hurried in the mart of New York than in the mart of London. ”

“ All are politically equal, all are comparatively on a level in education and even in property; any man may rise rapidly, and numbers are daily rising from the lowest round of the ladder to the chief places in commerce and the highest honours of the State. Equality, therefore, is the rule of life. It is the rule, as inequality is with us, throughout society. The farm labourer lives as an equal at his employer’s table, and I have seen very well-dressed children, the children I was told of wealthy parents, in school with the shoeless children of the emigrant. ”

“ We were led to believe that while the South was all dignity and self-sacrifice, the North was revelling in a ghastly and almost fiendish whirl of gaiety and dissipation. It no doubt was so among a certain set at New York, in the vortex of contracts and gambling speculation. But elsewhere I can bear witness that it was not. Elsewhere I can bear witness that society wore an aspect not unbecoming a nation under a great affliction. If people could only believe it there were too many mourners in Northern homes for mirth and feasting to prevail. ”

“ If the Government showed respect for law, did not the people show respect for authority? Those who declaim on the fickleness of Democracy may be safely challenged to produce from history an instance of a government so followed and supported through such trials and reverses. Never for a moment, even when the failure of the war seemed most complete, and when the elections of the great state of New York were going against the Government, did the constitutional ruler fail to command the constitutional obedience of the citizen. ”

“ With the power of voluntary association, which the members of a real community alone possess, they aided their government in its new and colossal task. They sustained it through all reverses, and in spite of all its errors, with the loyalty which can be paid only by a real community to the government of its choice. They animated it, and all who under it fought or laboured for the common cause, with the spirit of a united people. Gradually the resources of the slave oligarchy began to fail. ”

“ A successful trader in an aristocratic country buys a great estate, and founds a noble family: a successful trader in America founds a public institution. The great Italian republic never poured out her wealth more freely in her gallant struggles for the independence of Italy against the tyrants of Milan, than did the merchants of the North in struggling against the slave-owner for American freedom. That commerce must be mean is a feudal superstition; less meanness commonly goes with the wealth that has been earned by labour than with that which is inherited and not earned. ”

“ Then the victory was given into their hands. Let the nation which can boast of virtue pure and unalloyed, which has needed no pressure of circumstances to force it into the right way, no suffering to purge its vision that it might clearly discern good from evil, no chastisement to teach it the will of Heaven—let this nation, I say again, cast the first stone. To the American people the Union was not empire only, but immunity from hostile neighbourhood and standing armies ”

“ The fusion of classes fills society with a feeling of security, not so familiar here. It opens a wider and more varied range of social enjoyment, and better opportunities for the formation of social character to every right-minded man. I cannot conceive any countervailing benefits which an exclusive class, set on an eminence by itself, can either receive or confer. I know there are rich men in America who feel that wealth is not enough honoured, and who, while they conform to equality in public, recoil from it in secret, and are glad to come over to European society for comfort. ”

“ By a fatal compromise with evil, sure, if God is strong and just, to bring down in the end a full measure of retribution, it was received into the constitution of the new Republic—received by men who had the highest doctrines of liberty and equality on their lips, and had just vindicated their own rights as freemen with the sword. But then it wore the harmless aspect of an aged and sickly man, whose life could not be brought at once to a violent close, but who would soon die in the course of nature. In those days the production of cotton by slave labour was unprofitable. ”

“ It receives its reward, not only in the respect which proved valour ensures, but far more in liberation from the worst doom which can fall on man, that of being the active minister of evil. To oppress is worse than to be oppressed. If Slavery is degradation to the slave, it is far deeper degradation to the master; and emancipation is a far greater boon to the master than to the slave. To that cruel, corrupt, and barbarous society a hope of better things has come, though in the stern form of conquest. ”

“ If the persons and the property of men were not secure, how could industry thrive? Whence could the wealth arise? In no monarchy or aristocracy, I venture to say, is the reverence for law among the people so deep. If you asked Americans for what they were fighting, nine out of ten would tell you that they were fighting to vindicate the law. And surely a great community which is a law to itself is a glorious thing: not only in itself, but still more in what it denotes. It marks a great step in the progress of humanity. ”

“ Feudalism, Primogeniture, State Churches, are left behind for ever. Here was at all events a grand experiment; here was, for the first time, a great community, founded on the free allegiance of all its members to the common good; here was a great hope of Humanity, its newest and probably its fairest hope, though hope is not fulfilment, and though they to whom it is committed are human. ”

“ The United States have thus proved to the world that “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is competent to organise and wield vast combinations of power; to administer resources of extraordinary magnitude; to carry out the highest purposes of statesmanship to their most successful issues; and in the hour of triumph can exhibit a moderation of spirit and clemency towards the vanquished unexampled in history. ”

“ Good society was all on the same side. The Churches of the wealthier class, thinking no doubt that so long as they held fast to orthodoxy they might let morality go, or rather because they had no real faith in them, but only a traditional creed, bowed, under the hypocritical pretence of political neutrality, to the dominant iniquity of the hour. Conspicuous among them in compliance was that Church—the Church, as we have said, of wealth and fashion—the presence of which in America appears to our High-Churchmen the only redeeming feature in that God-forsaken world. ”

“ Almost as degrading to the poor whites as to the negro—morally, perhaps, even more degrading—it immolated the whole community to the vicious ends of a few wealthy men. Against the distinct command of Christianity, it branded labour with dishonour; and within its pale the meanest white preferred a life of penury, wandering, sponging on the great planters, to honest industry—the lot and badge of the negro slave. ”

“ The republic of Holland was the noble but transient offspring of a rebellion against a foreign master, whose tyranny provoked resistance and whose overthrow left the provinces for a time without a sovereign. The nation of the Old World which has approached most nearly to a commonwealth, though under monarchial and aristocratical forms, is that of which, in the hour when the love of the public good was strongest in the hearts of its citizens and their political character at its grandest elevation, the American Republic was born. ”

“ There is, if I mistake not, many a spirit among the great merchants of America as magnificent as that of any Cosmo or Lorenzo, though the magnificence of the American may not yet be guided by the same taste as that of the Florentine. Nor is wealth the thing, generally speaking, most worshipped by American society. Intellectual distinction is generally most worshipped. No owner of millions would have had the reception given to Mr. Dickens. The worship of intellect may itself be foolish and even wrong, it may be ill-directed, and assume ridiculous and repulsive forms. ”

“ Men cannot be forbidden to ask whether it is really well to let political power impose upon us spiritual guides, when the guides it imposes have, in this the most manifest conflict, as it seems to those who think as we do, between Good and Evil which has been waged in our days, almost unanimously taken the side of Evil; when they have gone up into their pulpits to preach a religion of purity and mercy, and come down from the pulpit to stand side by side with atheist sciolism in defence of Slavery and the Jamaica Massacre. ”

“ The United States having, fortunately for them, no real metropolis, there is no metropolitan press ruling the opinion of the whole country, and itself liable to the secret influences of the central government and of the circles of the capital. Nor is the press in America so poweful either for good or evil as it is here. The government being itself the authentic organ of the popular will does not stand so much in awe of self-constituted tribunes of the people. ”

“ It is a fearful moral evil, compared with which a tyranny may be almost regarded as a physical visitation. And, at the best, democracy, like the other forms of governnment, has special vices of its own: it is beset by faction, by corruption, by popular passion, by demagogism, by envious ostracism of merit, by oppression of classes which are not numerically strong. American democracy has not been free from these things, or from the odious self-worship of the sovereign people. ”