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Irish (search for this): chapter 3
ust as embarrassing. He forgot that the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the division between rich and poor,--the distinction of classes. Not only have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, betweeen aristocracy and middle class; they have not even the distinction between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes, negroes. Outside domestic service, within the range of conditions which an American may, in fact, be called upon to traverse, he passes easily from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and from riches to poverty. No one of his possible occupations appears degrading to him or makes him lose caste; and poverty itself appears to him as inconvenient and disagreeable rather than as humiliating. When the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home,
Du Barry (search for this): chapter 3
an, the ideas and morals are not republican. In America not only are the institutions republican, but the ideas and morals are pre; vailingly republican also. They are those of a plain, decent middle class. The ideal of those who are the public instructors of the people is the ideal of such a class. In France the ideal of the mass of popular journalists and popular writers of fiction, who are now practically the public instructors there, is, if you could see their hearts, a Pompadour or du Barry regime, with themselves for the part of Faublas. With this ideal prevailing, this vision of the objects for which wealth is desirable, the possessors of wealth become hateful to the multitude which toils and endures, and society is undermined. This is one of the many inconveniences which the French have to suffer from that worship of the great goddess Lubricity to which they are at present vowed. Wealth excites the most savage enmity there, because it is conceived as a means for gratifyi
John Manners (search for this): chapter 3
, not by what one can oneself gain from it, but by the ideal which it sets up. An aristocracy — if I may once more repeat words, which, however often repeated, have still a value, from their truth — aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl of Warwick, dressed in broad-cloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railway carriages, like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to th
Saul (search for this): chapter 3
ment. He is eager to set to work at a change which, even if it were desirable (and I think it is not), is yet off the line of those reforms which are really pressing. Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Professor Stuart, and Lord Richard Grosvenor are waiting ready to help him, and perhaps Mr. Chamberlain himself will lead the attack. I admire Mr. Chamberlain as a politician, because he has the courage — and it is a wise courage — to state large the reforms we need, instead of minimizing them. But like Saul, before his conversion, he breathes out threatenings and slaughter against the Church, and is likely, perhaps, to lead an assault upon her. He is a formidable assailant, yet I suspect he might break his finger-nails on her walls. If the Church has the majority for her, she will of course stand. But in any case, this institution, with all its faults, has that merit which makes the great strength of institutions — it offers an ideal which is noble and attaching. Equality is its profession, i<
Frederic Harrison (search for this): chapter 3
land, is like one seeing, thinking, and speaking in some other planet than ours. A man of even Mr. John Morley's gifts is provoked with the House of Lords, and straightway he declares himself against the existence of a Second Chamber at all; although — if there be such a thing as demonstration in politics — the working of the American Senate demonstrates a well-composed Second Chamber to be the very need and safeguard of a modern democracy. What a singular twist, again, in a man of Mr. Frederic Harrison's intellectual power, not, perhaps, to have in the exuberance of youthful energy weighted himself for the race of life by taking up a grotesque old French pedant upon his shoulders, but to have insisted, in middle age, in taking up the Protestant Dissenters too; and now, when he is becoming elderly, it seems as if nothing would serve him but he must add the Peace Society to his load! How perverse, yet again, in Mr. Herbert Spencer, at the very moment when past neglects and present n
Lepel Griffin (search for this): chapter 3
re is said to be much corruption among their politicians, and in the public service, in municipal administration, and in the administration of justice. Sir Lepel Griffin would lead us to think that the administration of justice, in particular, is so thoroughly corrupt, that a man with a lawsuit has only to provide his lawyer with thly and naturally the institutions of the United States work, how clearly, in some most important respects, the Americans see, how straight they think. Yet Sir Lepel Griffin says that there is no country calling itself civilized where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia. In politics I do not much trust Sir LSir Lepel Griffin. I hope that he administers in India some district where a profound insight into the being and working of institutions is not requisite. But, I suppose, of the tastes of himself and of that large class of Englishmen whom Mr. Charles Sumner has taught us to call the class of gentlemen, he is no untrustworthy reporter.
Quarterly Review (search for this): chapter 3
rs. But the more I saw of America, the more I found myself led to treat institutions with increased respect. Until I went to the United States I had never seen a people with institutions which seemed expressly and thoroughly suited to it. I had not properly appreciated the benefits proceeding from this cause. Sir Henry Maine, in an admirable essay which, though not signed, betrays him for its author by its rare and characteristic qualities of mind and style--Sir Henry Maine, in the Quarterly Review, adopts and often reiterates a phrase of M. Scherer, to the effect that Democracy is only a form of government. He holds up to ridicule a sentence of Mr. Bancroft's History, in which the American democracy is told that its ascent to power proceeded as uniformly and majestically as the laws of being, and was as certain as the decrees of eternity. Let us be willing to give Sir Henry Maine his way, and to allow no magnificent claim of this kind on behalf of the American democracy. Let u
Bright (search for this): chapter 3
term of office were longer, if his ministers sate in Congress, or must possess the confidence of Congress. Another observer may say that the marriage laws for the whole nation ought to be fixed by Congress, and not to vary at the will of the legislatures of the several States. I myself was much struck with the inconvenience of not allowing a man to sit in Congress except for his own district; a man like Wendell Phillips was thus excluded, because Boston would not return him. It is as if Mr. Bright could have no other constituency open to him if Rochdale would not send him to Parliament. But all these are really questions of machinery (to use my own term), and ought not so to engage our attention as to prevent our seeing that the capital fact as to the institutions of the United States is this: their suitableness to the American people, and their natural and easy working. If we are not to be allowed to say, with Mr. Beecher, that this people has a genius for the organization of sta
Richard Grosvenor (search for this): chapter 3
envy us this possession, they ought to. And my friend, one of the great Liberal party which has now, I suppose, pretty nearly run down its deceased wife's sister, poor thing, has his hand and heart full, so far as politics are concerned, of the question of church disestablishment. He is eager to set to work at a change which, even if it were desirable (and I think it is not), is yet off the line of those reforms which are really pressing. Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Professor Stuart, and Lord Richard Grosvenor are waiting ready to help him, and perhaps Mr. Chamberlain himself will lead the attack. I admire Mr. Chamberlain as a politician, because he has the courage — and it is a wise courage — to state large the reforms we need, instead of minimizing them. But like Saul, before his conversion, he breathes out threatenings and slaughter against the Church, and is likely, perhaps, to lead an assault upon her. He is a formidable assailant, yet I suspect he might break his finger-nails on he
Trevelyan (search for this): chapter 3
he tenants punctually paying their rents, prosperous and deferential, and society in Ireland settling quietly down again upon the old basis? And he might as well hope to see Strongbow come to life again! Which of us does not esteem and like Mr. Trevelyan, and rejoice in the high promise of his career? And how all his friends applauded when he turned upon the exasperating and insulting Irish members, and told them that he was an English gentleman! Yet, if one thinks of it, Mr. Trevelyan was Mr. Trevelyan was thus telling the Irish members simply that he was just that which Ireland does not want, and which can do her no good. England, to be sure, has given Ireland plenty of her worst, but she has also given her not scantily of her best. Ireland has had no insufficient supply of the English gentleman, with his honesty, personal courage, high bearing, good intentions, and limited vision; what she wants is statesmen with just the qualities which the typical English gentleman has not flexibility, open
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