British America

“ A short-lived joy was diffused throughout America, even by this delusive appearance of lenity. The people of every description manifested the strongest desire that harmony might be re-established between Great Britain and the colonies. Bonfires, illuminations, and all the usual expressions of popular satisfaction were displayed on the joyful occasion. Yes, amidst the demonstrations of this lively gratitude, there were some who had sagacity enough to see that the British ministry was not so much instigated by principles of equity, as impelled by necessity. ”

“ There were individuals, in and out of Parliament, who recognized the rights of Englishmen, and regarding the Americans as Englishmen, and America as a portion of the British empire, were in heart and with all their energies, in sympathy with the Americans in their struggle for their rights. ”

“ Throughout the eighteenth century she was wasting her opportunities of expansion in West and East alike in order to dominate Spain, Italy and the German confusion. The religious and political dissensions of Britain in the seventeenth century had driven many of the English to seek a permanent home in America. They struck root and increased and multiplied, giving the British a great advantage in the American struggle. ”

“ America, at the time of which we are writing, was remarkable for its attachment to the German family that then sat on the British throne; for, as is the fact with all provinces, the virtues and qualities that are proclaimed near the centre of power, as incense and policy, get to be a part of political faith with the credulous and ignorant at a distance. ”

“ But, contending for independency and total disconnection from England, as an Englishman, I cannot wish them success; for in a due constitutional dependency, including the ancient supremacy of this country in regulating their commerce and navigation, consists the mutual happiness and prosperity both of England and America. ”

“ The British Empire must needs achieve its [23] industrial consolidation in the teeth of a commercial competition a thousand times fiercer than anything which America knew in her young days. The United States grew to greatness in a secluded nursery. Great Britain must bring up her children in the streets and on the high seas, under the eyes and exposed to the seductions of the peoples of all the world.
The American is a reasoning being. ”

“ Taken as a whole, the Britannica's divisions on culture are little more than a brief for British art and science — a brief fraught with the rankest injustice toward the achievements of other nations, and especially toward those of America. ”

“ Thus after 1832 the previous sympathy for America of one section of the British governing class disappears. More--it is replaced by a critical, if not openly hostile attitude. Soon, with the rapid development of the power and wealth of the United States, governing-class England, of all factions save the Radical, came to view America just as it would have viewed any other rising nation, that is, as a problem to be studied for its influence on British prosperity and power. ”

“ Yes, it is indeed too true that we must look for new and: energetic governments in recently settled countries. The British colonies of North America passed through a Revolution, and reared for themselves the proudest republic on the face of the earth. ”

“ To remind him that our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. ”

“ British friends attempted to explain and to soothe, usually to their astonished discomfiture on receiving angry American replies. An excellent illustration of this is in a pamphlet published in Boston in the fall of 1862, entitled, Field and Loring, Correspondence on the Present Relations between Great Britain and the United States of America. The American, Loring, wrote, "The conviction is nearly if not quite universal that we have foes where we thought we had friends," p. ”

“ Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred204 years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life! ”

“ Now, if the doctrines of policy contained in these preambles, and the force of these examples in the acts of Parliament, avail anything, what can be said against applying them with regard to America? Are not the people of America as much Englishmen as the Welsh? ”

“ The difference between the genius of the British constitution, which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries. ”

“ England, like other monarchies, had slumbered on contented and prosperous, and for the most part inglorious, during the eighteenth century. A great writer observed, that while America was doubling her population every twenty-five years, Europe was lumbering on with an increase, which would hardly arrive at the same result in five hundred ”

“ Does it not seem plain, therefore, in the shifting of places and combinations, that the British Empire and the United States are to be the chief factors in the new historical scenes of the twentieth century? ”

“ The world explains the British Empire of to-day, and the great American nation which has sprung from it, by a happy congenital talent for colonizing waste places, for self-government, for assimilating and making friends with the unprogressive peoples, by giving them a better government than they had before. And certainly without such gifts the British races could not have overspread so large a portion of the earth. ”

“ When I am asserting the fact that the people of England have a great interest in the well-being of the American Republic, I mean the people of England. I do not speak of the wearers of crowns or of coronets, but of the twenty millions of people in this country who live on their labour, and who, having no votes, are not counted in our political census, but without whom there could be no British nation at all. ”

“ In the United States there are several million British-born who are lost to the Empire for ever. Their sentiments are British, their sympathies are British, but their interests are here, and interest becomes sentiment. And observe that their children born here have sentiment as well as interest for the land of their birth.
“The British Empire is the largest in the world. In natural resources it is the wealthiest. It could support a population of hundreds of millions in a high degree of prosperity. The British are an able and intelligent people. The nation is rich. ”

“ There is no country more worthy of our study than England. The spirit of her constitution is most analogous to ours. The manners of her people—their intellectual activity—their freedom of opinion—their habits of thinking on those subjects which concern the dearest interests and most sacred charities of private life, are all congenial to the American character; and, in fact, are all intrinsically excellent: for it is in the moral feeling of the people that the deep foundations of British prosperity are laid ”

“ Thus British institutions—the institutions of national self-government, which are peculiarly British in origin—have played a main part both in determining the character of the British Empire and in bringing about its wonderful expansion. The more the British Empire has grown the more freedom has been established on the face of the earth. ”

“ But the Anglo-American stands preëminent for deeds of injustice and acts of oppression, unparalleled, perhaps, in the annals of modern history.
We admit the existence of great and good people in America, England, France, and the rest of Europe, who desire a unity of interests among the whole human family, of whatever origin or race. ”

“ Well, England may be, to all intents and purposes, a republic, but to rise from the ranks is only for the man of commanding talent, and for him there is always room at the top—everywhere—all over the world. But for the ordinary man who has ordinary abilities, and yet is not without ambition, America is the land. ”

“ Yet that journey gave me, more than anything else I saw, a sense of the greatness of the American people. There is, I suppose, some one thing in the history of every nation which impresses the man who realizes, even dimly, the meaning of it, more than anything else does. Elizabethan England's buccaneering adventures to the Spanish main seem to me to make intelligible the peculiar greatness of England more than anything else her people have ever done. Revolutionary France in arms against Europe is France at her most glorious, with her special splendor at its brightest. ”

“ There are opportunities here which England can never give to her people. I love the land of my birth, I love Englishmen and English ways,—I none the less, however, love democratic America and the opportunities that it affords. ”

“ In every city to which I went I found at least two or three thousand people according to the size of my place of lecture, quickly and ardently responsive to the idea that America and Great Britain, acting together, might lift the world out of its ruined state and lead civilization to a higher plane. ”

“ The Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. ”

“ Now we, this kingdom of Great Britain, have been for a good while accustomed to hold the same position in the world as the United States of America, and we have been withal accustomed to hold it for a much longer time than the United States of America have. ”

“ However England may regard us, we need only view her as a splendid example of a nation great and powerful by the productiveness of her soil and mines, the ability of her people, and the liberalizing spirit of her commerce. In her present external condition, in her vast navy, her extensive commerce, in all save her insulated and secure position, we may read our own near destiny. Grasping, ambitious and powerful the British race certainly is ”

“ The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat. ”

“ Great Britain is decidedly a commercial and money-making nation, and counts closely on her commercial relations with any country. That nation or people which puts the largest amount of money into her coffers, are the people who may expect to obtain her greatest favors. This the Americans do; consequently—and we candidly ask you to mark the prediction—the British will interpose little or no obstructions to the Canadas, Cuba, or any other province or colony contiguous to this country, falling into the American Union; except only in such cases where there would be a compromise of her honor. ”

“ Great Britain could have afforded better than France to tie its national life to an over-national idea, but the only idea in which Britons have really believed was that of British security, prosperity, and power. ”

“ For more than a hundred years the British Government has labored to disunite our Union or in some way to destroy our Republic, yet we still have Anglo-Americans, and, be it said to our shame, an English Government in Washington, D.C. Let a crown prince or some great lord come to the United States, and then something is sure to happen. ”

“ We have explored the countryside, and studied and analyzed the structure of insular society. We have consorted with Barons, Squires, and Knights of the Shire; with Bishops, Priests, and Deacons; with Waacs, Wrens, and V.A.D.’s; with Farmers, Hedgers, and Land Girls; with Mayors and Corporations. They are all interesting; most of them are quite human; and all, once you know them, are extremely friendly and anxious to entertain us.
For instance, there was the Fourth of July, officially celebrated in London. British Official—not American. The Americans are a patriotic people ”

“ Baffled in his endeavor to plant the English race upon this continent, he yet called into existence a spirit of enterprise which first gave Virginia, and then North America, to that race, and which led Great Britain, from this beginning, to dot the map of the world with her colonies, and through them to become the greatest power of the earth. ”

“ England will surely, ere long, learn to look upon this country as the inheritor of her glory; the younger England, destined to perpetuate the language, the memory, the virtues of the noble land from which she is descended. Loving and honoring my country, as I do, I cannot look upon America with any feeling of hostility. ”

“ The latest and best of the English historians has said that, however important the independence of America might be in the history of England, it was of overwhelming importance in the history of the world, and that though it might have crippled for a while the supremacy of the English nation, it founded the supremacy of the English race. ”