The Young Man From The Country

A song of the hour, now in course of being sung and whistled in
every street, the other day reminded the writer of these words--as
he chanced to pass a fag-end of the song for the twentieth time in a
short London walk--that twenty years ago, a little book on the
United States, entitled American Notes, was published by "a Young
Man from the Country", who had just seen and left it.

This Young Man from the Country fell into a deal of trouble, by
reason of having taken the liberty to believe that he perceived in
America downward popular tendencies for which his young enthusiasm
had been anything but prepared. It was in vain for the Young Man to
offer in extenuation of his belief that no stranger could have set
foot on those shores with a feeling of livelier interest in the
country, and stronger faith in it, than he. Those were the days
when the Tories had made their Ashburton Treaty, and when Whigs and
Radicals must have no theory disturbed. All three parties waylaid
and mauled the Young Man from the Country, and showed that he knew
nothing about the country.

As the Young Man from the Country had observed in the Preface to his
little book, that he "could bide his time", he took all this in
silent part for eight years. Publishing then, a cheap edition of
his book, he made no stronger protest than the following:

"My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the
influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, have any
existence but in my imagination. They can examine for themselves
whether there has been anything in the public career of that country
during these past eight years, or whether there is anything in its
present position, at home or abroad, which suggests that those
influences and tendencies really do exist. As they find the fact,
they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going,
in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I
had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such thing, they
will consider me altogether mistaken. I have nothing to defend, or
to explain away. The truth is the truth; and neither childish
absurdities, nor unscrupulous contradictions, can make it otherwise.
The earth would still move round the sun, though the whole Catholic
Church said No."

Twelve more years having since passed away, it may now, at last, be
simply just towards the Young Man from the Country, to compare what
he originally wrote, with recent events and their plain motive
powers. Treating of the House of Representatives at Washington, he
wrote thus:

"Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who, applying
themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and