Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke

“ Each time you reach a clump of banyans, tamarind and tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades: village police-station, government posting-stable, and serai are always inclosed within its limits. All the villages are fortified with lofty walls of mud or brick, as are the numerous police-stations along the road, where the military constabulary, in their dark-blue tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees of bright red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and, turning out with tulwárs and rifles, perform the military salute—due in India to the white face from all native troops. ”

“ The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found America. ”

“ The fort and palace of Akbar are the Moslem creed in stone. Without—turned toward the unbeliever and the foe—the far-famed triple walls, frowning one above the other with the frown that a hill-fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel; within is the secure paradise of the believing “Emperor of the world”—delicious fountains pouring into basins of the whitest marble, beds of rose and myrtle, balconies and pavilions; part of the zenana, or women‘s wing, overhanging the river, and commanding the distant snow-dome of the Taj. ”

“ The names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly applicable to California; her light and landscape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the Pacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow: even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons—all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the sea. ”

“ It is idle to point to the tropics and say that free communities do not exist within those limits: the map of the world will show that freedom exists only in the homes of the English race. France, the authoress of modern liberty, has failed as yet to learn how to retain the boon for which she is ever ready to shed her blood; Switzerland, a so-called free State, is the home of the worst of bigotry and intolerance; the Spanish republics are notoriously despotisms under democratic titles; America, Australia, Britain, the homes of our race, are as yet the only dwelling-spots of freedom. ”

“ WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost question; their future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life, full of charm—lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. ”

“ The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo princes spending a week in purification at the holy place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke and sickening smell from the “burning ghauts” that meets you, mingled with a sweeter smell of burning spices, as you work your way through the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river‘s bank—all alike are strange to the English traveler, and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and ceremonies that we do not understand. ”

“ The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm, and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle-covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. ”

“ At the moment when England, Germany, and America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental literature—when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books—our government in India is refusing the customary help to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the teachers of the language.
So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English tongue, they remain ignorant of all the civilization of our time—ignorant alike of political and physical science, of philosophy and true learning. ”

“ A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on the shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first “smells the molasses” at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an American. You may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. ”

“ In England he is somebody; in America he finds all hands contented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what others seem to think—a nobody; a man who no longer is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the world knows him no more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead. ”

“ Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.
Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class; but in America these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. ”

“ In Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the English have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All Europe seems small when seen from the United States; but the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked on with some respect: France alone completely vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, “What does the Emperor say?” no one cares in the least what Napoleon does or thinks. ”

“ For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the Yosémite. ”

“ At The Buller, I had found the forest, which comes down at present to the water‘s edge, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and hundred tents and boweries which form the town, smoking with fires on every side, and the parrots chattering with fright. The fires obstinately refused to spread, but the tall feathery trees were falling fast under the axes of some hundred diggers, who seemed not to have much romantic sympathy for the sufferings of the tree-ferns they had uprooted, or of the passion-flowers they were tearing from the evergreens they had embraced. ”

“ In this modern democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has no place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but we can no longer read them. A few months may see a café chantant at their base.
Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who squat behind their trays. ”

“ Our road, next morning, from The Cass, where we had spent the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills and down to Canterbury Plains by way of Porter‘s Pass—a narrow track on the top of a tremendous precipice, but soon to be changed for a road cut along its face. The plains are one great sheep-run, open, almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of size. At the mountain-foot they are covered with tall, coarse, native grass, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about Christchurch, the English clover and English grasses have usurped the soil, and all is fresh and green. ”

“ THE English traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese. When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land. ”

“ A Hindoo of the lowest caste will spurn the gift of a turban or a loin-cloth the ornamentation of which consists not with his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing could induce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, masquerading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and his friends with jealousy and mortification. In art as in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet; and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as much feeling—as deep poetry—in the curves of the Hindoo Saree as in the outlines of the Taj. ”

“ If to Russia, the political shrewdness and commercial blindness of the Northern Power would combine to make our pocket suffer by loss of money as much as would our dignity by so plain a confession of our impotence; while the unhappy Indians would discover that there exists a European nation capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in corruption by as much as it already exceeds them in dull weight of leaden cruelty and oppression. If to herself, unextinguishable anarchy would involve our Eastern trade and India‘s happiness in a hideous and lasting ruin. ”

“ Although we are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our manufacturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in America and dearer in Old England, we have nevertheless as much to bestow on America as she has to confer on us. The possession of India offers to ourselves that element of vastness of dominion which, in this age, is needed to secure width of thought and nobility of purpose; but to the English race our possession of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of China offers the possibility of planting free institutions among the dark-skinned races of the world. ”

“ It is never too hot, never too cold, to work—a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. ”

“ If you ask a Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out: “Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it‘s death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won‘t touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country—one New York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?”
The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. ”

“ On the plains, the glorious climate, the masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the hand of man, and for man you are continually searching. Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea: it is nature‘s own lone solitude, but from no fault of ours—the higher parts of the plateau were not made for man. ”

“ In Pennsylvania, you may sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex; while in New England, you seem only to be in some part of Europe that you have never happened to light upon before; in California, you are at last in a new world. The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are new, the birds and plants are new; the atmosphere, crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific coast does not produce a new school of Saxon poets—painters it has already given to the world. ”

“ There remains the slave class, and little else. We may select a few of these to be our policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the executioners of their countrymen; we may teach a few to chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offices; but virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling class, and reduce the government to a mere imperialism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. ”

“ The Englishman founds everywhere a New England—new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. ”