Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[33] not strange, on such a method, that Maine should inform us that the majority of the present State governments were formed before the Union, and that only half the original thirteen colonies held slaves. So Mr. John A. Doyle, writing an extended history of American colonization, put into his first volume a map making the lines of all the early grants run north and south instead of east and west; and this having been received with polite incredulity, gave us another map depicting the New England colonies in 1700, with Plymouth still delineated as a separate government, although it had been united with Massachusetts eight years before.

When a lady in a London drawing-room sends, by a returning New Yorker, an urgent message to her cousin at Colorado Springs, we rather enjoy it, and call it only pretty Fanny's way; she is not more ignorant of North American geography than we ourselves may be of that of South America. But when we find that English scholars of established reputation betray, when on ground we know, defects of method that seem hopeless, what reverence is left for those who keep on ground that we do